The short story in America has for almost two centuries held a prominent, even pre-eminent place in the American literary tradition. It was the Irish writer Frank O'Connor, himself a noted writer of short stories, who said that for the Americans the short story had become ‘a national art form’. It could be argued, indeed, that around the 1820s and 1830s the Americans virtually invented what has come to be called ‘the short story’, in its modern literary sense (although one should of course note the parallel European tradition in, for instance, the development of the Russian short story from Gogol in the 1830s). Certainly the short story found its first theorist in one of its major early practitioners, Edgar Allan Poe; and the short story was for Poe his most successful and influential literary form. A number of other American writers in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have, arguably, done their best work in that medium. Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories rank with his novel The Scarlet Letter as among his most outstanding achievements. Herman Melville's best short stories, such as ‘Bartleby’, may not outweigh the epic achievement of Moby Dick, but for many readers they are equally rewarding and more formed and finished as works of art. Stephen Crane's short fictions (like ‘The Open Boat’ and ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky’) are as well known as his great novel The Red Badge of Courage.