The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story

1. Introduction
 2. The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne
 4. Edgar Allan Poe
 5. Herman Melville
 6. New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
 7. Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
 8. Henry James
 9. Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
 10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton
 11. Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
 12. O. Henry and Jack London
 13. Sherwood Anderson
 14. Ernest Hemingway
 15. F. Scott Fitzgerald
 16. William Faulkner
 17. Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O\'Connor
 18. Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
 19. Aspects of the American short story 1930-80
 20. Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
 22. The postmodern short story in America
 22. Raymond Carver
 23. Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
 Guide to further reading.