Short Story Writers And Short Stories (Bloom's 20th Anniversary)

204 Pages·2005·1.02 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

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BLOOM’S LITERARY 20THANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
CRITICISM
Dramatists and Dramas
The Epic
Essayists and Prophets
Novelists and Novels
Poets and Poems
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
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Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
®
©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
®
www.chelseahouse.com
Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bloom, Harold.
Short story writers and short stories / Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s 20th anniversary collection)
ISBN 0-7910-8228-8 HC 0-7910-8367-5 PB
1. Short story. I. Title.
PN3373.B57 2005
808.83’1—dc22
2005006399
Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi
Cover illustration by David Levine
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
Table of Contents
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PREFACE RY

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Harold Bloom R
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INTRODUCTION S
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Harold Bloom D

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Alexandr Pushkin (1799–1837)
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
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Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875)
12
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
19
Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852)
30
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883)
32
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
35
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
42
Mark Twain (1835–1910)
53
Henry James (1843–1916)
55
Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893)
65
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
69
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)
73
O. Henry (1862–1910)
75
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
77
Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
82
Jack London (1876–1916)
83
Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941)
85
Stephen Crane (1879–1900)
86
James Joyce (1882–1941)
89
Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
91
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
106
Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
108
Isaac Babel (1894–1940)
113
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
121
William Faulkner (1897–1962)
123
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
125
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
130
John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
133
Eudora Welty (1909–2001)
135
John Cheever (1912–1982)
145
Julio Cortázar (1914–1984)
146
Shirley Jackson (1919–1965)
148
J.D. Salinger (1919–)
150
Italo Calvino (1923–1985)
152
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
159
Cynthia Ozick (1928–)
168
John Updike (1932–)
175
Raymond Carver (1938–1988)
176
FURTHERREADING 179
INDEX 181
ABOUTTHEAUTHOR 188

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Preface A
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I BEGAN EDITING ANTHOLOGIES OF LITERARY CRITICISM FOR CHELSEA
House in early 1984, but the first volume, Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical
Views, was published in January, 1985, so this is the twentieth anniversary
of a somewhat Quixotic venture. If asked how many separate books have
been issued in this project, I no longer have a precise answer, since in so
long a span many volumes go out of print, and even whole series have been
discontinued. A rough guess would be more than a thousand individual
anthologies, a perhaps insane panoply to have been collected and intro-
duced by a single critic.
Some of these books have surfaced in unlikely places: hotel rooms in
Bologna and Valencia, Coimbra and Oslo; used-book stalls in Frankfurt
and Nice; on the shelves of writers wherever I have gone. A batch were sent
by me in answer to a request from a university library in Macedonia, and I
have donated some of them, also by request, to a number of prisoners serv-
ing life sentences in American jails. A thousand books across a score of
years can touch many shores and many lives, and at seventy-four I am a lit-
tle bewildered at the strangeness of the endeavor, particularly now that it
has leaped between centuries.
It cannot be said that I have endorsed every critical essay reprinted, as
my editor’s notes have made clear. Yet the books have to be reasonably
reflective of current critical modes and educational fashions, not all of them
provoking my own enthusiasm. But then I am a dinosaur, cheerfully nam-
ing myself as “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator.” I accept only three crite-
ria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive
power, wisdom. What is now called “relevance” will be in the dustbins in
less than a generation, as our society (somewhat tardily) reforms prejudices
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