Of all the literary forms considered in this book, the one most closely associated with the narration of community and place is the short story cycle, which may be defined as a single-authored volume comprising a complex– as opposed to a loosely arranged collection– of stories that are linked in various ways, most often by setting. Due to its composite structure the short story cycle is especially well suited to the task of providing diverse perspectives on particular localities. Indeed, there are numerous twentieth-century examples of the form which provide multifaceted accounts of real or imaginary American places. Typically the setting that unites a cycle's diverse views or voices is proclaimed in its title: consider for instance Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), John Cheever's The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958) or Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Until only relatively recently, however, short story cycles written by American authors have received scant attention from literary critics. Anderson's volume of tales of small-town Ohio life and a handful of modernist composite narratives– for example, Ernest Hemingway's in our time (1924) and William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942)– received acclaim for their innovation upon publication. Otherwise, the formal characteristics and capacities of the short story cycle, and its development as a distinct mode of writing, have generally been overlooked. The form's marginalisation owes much to the superior status of the novel, which is still widely presumed to demand from authors greater artistic vision and endeavour than do short stories. If the short story cycle is thought to have a role to play, then, it is to provide aspiring young writers with a looser, and therefore more forgiving, form so that they may hone their craft before graduating to the more complex challenges of novel-writing.

Such attitudes, however, ignore the fact that the short story cycle has long served as a principal literary form for telling stories about situated communities. Indeed, in many ways it is an eminently suitable vehicle for realising the complexities of place. For, along with its obvious plural aspect, the short story cycle is defined by a vital tension between cohesion and fragmentation. Unlike the individual chapters of most novels, the constituent stories of a cycle make sense when read separately from one another.