Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/404

 388 The Short Story years later the critic Copeland could devote an entire Atlantic article to the short-story collections of the year. The full triumph came in 1891, which produced this significant list of collections: Elsket, and Other Stories, Thomas Nelson Page; Balaam and his Master, Joel Chandler Harris; Flute and Violin, James Lane Allen; Otto the Knight, Octave Thanet (Alice French); Main-Travelled Roads, Hamlin Garland; Gallegher, and Other Stories, Richard Harding Davis; Fourteen to One, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills, Rose Terry Cooke; Iduna, and Other Stories, George A. Hibbard; Three Tales, William Douglas O'Connor; Uncle of an Angel, Thomas A. Janvier; Zadoc Pine, and Other Stories, Bunner; With My Friends, Brander Matthews; Rudder Grangers Abroad, Stockton; The Adventures of Three Worthies, Clinton Ross. 1884 was the climactic year in the history of the short story inasmuch as it produced The Lady or the Tiger? and In the Tennessee Mountains, each one of them a literary sensation that advertised the form tremendously. No book since Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp had been launched with such im- petus as the latter of these. For six years the name of Charles Egbert Craddock had been appealing more and more to the national imagination because of a series in the Atlantic of strongly impressionistic studies of life in the Tennessee moun- tains. Now suddenly it came to light that the author was a woman, Miss Mary N. Murfree. The sensation in the Atlantic office spread everjrwhere and gave tremendous vogue not only to the book but to the type of short story that it represented. No one had gone quite so far before: the dialect was pressed to an extreme that made it almost unintelligible; grotesque localisms in manners and point of view were made central; and all was displayed before a curtain of mountains splashed with broad colours. The year was notable too because it produced Brander Matthews's The Philosophy of the Short- story, a magazine article later expanded into a volimie, the first scientific handling of the art of the form since Poe's review of Hawthorne. Realism, or more exactly, perhaps, naturalism, ruled the decade. From all sections of the country came now a tide of short fiction the chief characteristic of which was its fidel-