The beginning of the twentieth century saw a huge growth in the popularity and sales of the short story, and at the same time important changes in its form and preoccupations, particularly among serious practitioners. In 1885 there were around 3,300 magazines in the United States which published short stories. By 1905 this figure had risen to 10,800. The short story was seen as the ideal popular form because of its easily assimilable length, and its frequent preoccupation (inherited originally from Poe) with the sensational, the strange and the dramatic. As Andrew Levy has pointed out, it also appealed to an age which was beginning to value the virtues of efficient mass production, the ‘machine aesthetic’ which lauded the well-made, the conventional and the easily used, ‘maximal efficiency and minimum waste’. The first twenty years of the century also saw the appearance of handbooks on how to write short stories, which were popular to well into the mid-century (and still persist): those guides to commercially successful writing which laid down ‘rules’ of plot structure, character presentation, the creation of atmosphere and the like. Needless to say, these books tended actively to discourage innovation – ‘Don't stray from the norm’ one publication of 1957 was still advising – and appealed to writers very different from the ones discussed in this book.