The History of the Short Story

Just how old is the short story? Old. It may not be the oldest thing in the world, but the short story has been around for a very long time. In fact, the earliest known short stories came from the tombs of ancient Egypt and date back to 3,000 B.C./B.C.E.

Short stories also circulated south of ancient Egypt.  A couple of these stories involved a spider named Ananzi. One was called “Ananzi the Spider and Turtle” and the other, “Ananzi and the Make-Believe Food.” Both stories taught lessons including treating others as you would want to be treated and avoiding greed.

The Bible also made its share of contributions to the development of the short story with stories such as Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel, Moses and the Red Sea, David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lion’s Den (written between approximately 1440 B.C. and 164 B.C./B.C.E.) . Later in the New Testament, Jesus Christ used stories to make his points more effectively ( between A.D. 30 and A.D. 33).

India made its contribution to the history of the short story with the Jatakas and the Panchatantra Hindu beast fables. In the beast fables, talking animals made moral points and taught important lessons. Other famous animal tales in ancient literature included those told by the Greek slave Aesop. Aesop's Fables originated sometime in the sixth century B.C./B.C.E. One of the stories was the popular “Tortoise and the Hare.”

The Middle Ages witnessed the birth of Chaucer's famous Canterbury Tales (1387-1395). One of these is the “Miller's Tale,” a sultry tale of an old carpenter whose voluptuous eighteen-year-old wife, Alisoun, has a fling with a border who is an astrology student with the keen ability to predict the weather. However he is not her only admirer. A parish clerk named Absolon would also like a chance with Alisoun. But things go awry and both lovers find themselves getting burned in the end, one of them literally.   

Despite the greatness of all these stories, the short story did not reach the zenith of its true potential until the nineteenth century when mass marketing and commercial magazines made short stories more accessible to more people.

One such short-story writer who benefited from this era of mass marketing and commercial magazines was Washington Irving (1783-1859), now considered by scholars and critics to be the father of the modern short story. He is most remembered for his stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”

Instead of teaching a lesson, Irving believed that the primary purpose of the short story was to entertain. For instance, the “Legend of Sleepy Hallow” tells the story of a lanky school teacher who has a terrifying encounter with a legendary headless horseman. There is no lesson to speak of, just a literary thrill ride.

Later, Edgar Allen Poe and Anton Chekhov fine-tuned the short story giving us two distinct types: the well-made short story and the slice-of-life short story, both of which are still used today.