Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Poe's Magazine
- 2 The Land of Definition
- 3 Edith Wharton: The Muse's Strategy
- 4 Handbooks and Workshops: A Brief History of the Creative Writing ‘Revolution’
- 5 Back Home Again: Bobbie Ann Mason's “Shiloh”
- Postscript: Iowa City
- Notes
- Index
- Titles in the series
2 - The Land of Definition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Poe's Magazine
- 2 The Land of Definition
- 3 Edith Wharton: The Muse's Strategy
- 4 Handbooks and Workshops: A Brief History of the Creative Writing ‘Revolution’
- 5 Back Home Again: Bobbie Ann Mason's “Shiloh”
- Postscript: Iowa City
- Notes
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
First of all (I would say), my young friend, you should choose a truly American subject. All the critics say that this is essential. Americanism is what the age demands; and it must be produced even if we have to invent a machine to do it. Do not go abroad for your theme. Do not trifle with the effete European nightingale or ramble among Roman ruins. Take a theme from the great Republic; something that comes close to the business and bosoms of the Democracy; something unconventional and virile. Take, for example, the Clam – the native, American, free-born, little-neck Clam. We all know it. We all love it. Deal originally and vividly with the Clam.
Henry Van Dyke, from an address delivered before the Periodical Publishers' Association of America, Washington, D.C., April 17, 1904, quoted in Esenwein, Writing the Short Story (1908) 41.If the first peculiar truth of the American short story is that Edgar Allan Poe is its patron saint, then the second peculiar truth is that the genre is a purely American art form. When Peter Prescott, in his introduction to the Norton Anthology of American Short Stories (1988), writes simply that the short story is “ours,” he invokes a commonplace that evolved in the nineteenth Century, and has maintained currency ever since.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story , pp. 27 - 57Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993