Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century

Maupassant and the American Short Story isolates and develops more fully than any previous study the impact of Maupassant's work on the writing of Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Kate Chopin, and Henry James. It introduces a new perspective to assess their canons, reviving the importance of many often-ignored stories and, in the cases of Maupassant and O. Henry, reasserting the necessity of studying such writers to understand the history of the genre.

An important moment in the history of the shor...