The American Short Story since 1950

In Advertisements for Myself(1959), a kind of autobiographical anthology of the evolution of a writing style, Norman Mailer included some examples from his brief ‘interim career as a writer of short stories’. Following the poor reception of his second novel, Barbary Shore, Mailer wrote, he had decided to pursue a ‘New York career’ - ‘I would get myself printed in the New Yorker, in Harper’s Ba[aar, Mademoiselle’.¹ Perhaps because no more than a day was to be spent on each story, they generally ‘didn’t do too well’. Mailer was sure he was through with ‘short stories and markets and editors and agents … done with trying to write less than I knew’. The epiphany complete, he woke up the next day with thoughts of Joyce, Zola and Melville, and ‘the plan for a prologue and an eight-part novel in my mind’.²

I start this chapter with Mailer because his 1960s distaste for the 1950s magazine story - ‘they are respectable. They make no attempt to raise the house an inch or two’ - was not untypical.³ His objection, however, was not just to the short story’s association with commercial magazine publishing. Arguing that the artist should not view the age ‘statically’ but confront it, Mailer complained that:

The short story has a tendency to look for climates of permanence -
an event occurs, a man is hurt by it in some small way forever. The
novel moves as naturally as flux. An event occurs, a man is injured,
and a month later is working on something else. The short story
likes to be classic. It is most acceptable when one fatal point is made.
Whereas the novel is dialectical.⁴

This distinction was formulated in relation to Philip Roth’s second novel, Letting Go (1962) which Mailer regarded as a ‘collection of intricately interconnected short stories’ rather than as a proper novel. In Letting Go, Roth himself had expressed doubts about the New Critical emphasis on ‘all that form crap’ and its impetus towards ‘completeness

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