Great American Short Stories (Barnes & Noble Signature Editions)

By Jane Smiley

From Washington Irving (1783–1859) to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), the authors represented in this expansive American short story anthology invite you to see the world as they saw it.

Irving’s culture-defining tales of American life—“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”—offer a turn of events that both surprises and chills the reader. In “Bartleby,” Herman Melville introduces us to a lawyer whose easy way of life is upended by a mysterious new clerk who denies his authority, perplexes his visitors, and scandalizes his professional reputation. The title character of “Athénaïs,” by Kate Chopin, is a new wife who rebels against the submissive role expected of her by her parents and husband. In Willa Cather’s “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” a young man accompanies the body of his friend and mentor from New York to the renowned artist’s hometown where no one ever understood him. And Fitzgerald’s “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” reveals the treachery of a wealthy man protecting his fortune.

 

Also among the thirty-four stories included in this collection are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County,” Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” Henry James’s “The Real Right Thing,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” and Sherwood Anderson’s “The Egg.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781435141117

Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1987. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and her novel, Private Life, was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.

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Introduction, Annotations, and Further Reading

© 2012 by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WASHINGTON IRVING (1783–1859)

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW

RIP VAN WINKLE

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804–1864)

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN

THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

THE TELL-TALE HEART

THE PURLOINED LETTER

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819–1891)

BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832–1888)

MY CONTRABAND

MARK TWAIN (1835–1910)

THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF CALEVERAS COUNTY

BRET HARTE (1836–1902)

THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP

THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT

AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–C.1914)

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE

HENRY JAMES (1843–1916)

THE REAL RIGHT THING

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849–1909)

A WHITE HERON

KATE CHOPIN (1850–1904)

ATHÉNAÏSE

MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1852–1930)

THE REVOLT OF MOTHER

CHARLES W. CHESNUTT (1858–1932)

THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860–1935)

THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER

EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937)

THE OTHER TWO

AUTRES TEMPS . . .

O. HENRY (1862–1910)

THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF

THE GIFT OF THE MAGI

STEPHEN CRANE (1871–1900)

THE OPEN BOAT

THE BRIDE COMES TO YELLOW SKY

JACK LONDON (1876–1916)

TO BUILD A FIRE

WILLA CATHER (1873–1947)

THE SCULPTOR’S FUNERAL

PAUL’S CASE

SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876–1941)

SOPHISTICATION

THE EGG

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896–1940)

BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

IN THE EARLY PART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, JUST AFTER THE WAR OF 1812, when the United States was still a young country, American authors began to take on an ambitious and fascinating task, which was to map, in the form of the short story, the vast and mysterious country that had come into existence only four decades before. They were lucky—they had an audience of literate readers, as well as a growing medium in the form of weekly and monthly magazines. And they had the sense of self-consciousness that comes from embarking upon a great adventure. Their readers, too, were aware that something was new and important about the world they were attempting to create, that even though such European authors as Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Goldsmith were compelling, they were not present at this birth. Our first American authors, such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, also knew that the United States already had a history, and that it would be both valuable and entertaining to explore that history, to place current events into a context of earlier, mythic ones. They were influenced by European fashions (such as the gothic tale, an example being Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto), but the landscape around them was wilder, more pastoral. As the nineteenth century progressed, later writers recognized that they, too, were in receipt of a gift—the nation spreading westward afforded them an abundance of inspiration. In a manner almost unbelievable to readers of the twenty-first century, our authors boldly followed their subjects, discovering and portraying not only a continent, but also the wild characters who roamed it.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the writings of Henry James and Edith Wharton, civilization replaced wilderness as the essential subject of the short story, but it was civilization with a twist—old, famous, and corrupt cultural centers were infused with new blood and new money, creating a vibrant and multifaceted transatlantic world. In the meantime, the United States had become stratified and complex in ways that O. Henry, Jack London, and Sherwood Anderson never ceased exploring. The story form continued to reach millions of readers—in tiny little magazines, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist publication the Forerunner; in prestigious arbiters of taste, such as the Atlantic Monthly; and in popular publications, such as the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal. Novels were important, but stories served a larger audience, giving Americans a sense of themselves and their world in small, multiple doses.

The present volume samples that wealth. It invites the reader to see the world as our ancestors saw it and offers a taste of those many pleasures. Each of our authors was ambitious and eccentric. Some produced their most beloved work early in their careers and died unknown. Some were world-renowned for decades. A few were bona fide adventurers, several lived in poverty, and one or two dwelt in unusual comfort. Almost all depended on their work for sustenance, and so made interesting and productive compromises that cause their work to be all the more lively. Each has a characteristic voice and point of view; in some sense, none of our authors ever knew his or her place—all were curious and determined to investigate. Some believed in the system they depicted, a few hoped to upend it. They were, therefore, typically American.

Washington Irving (1783–1859) was born in Manhattan, just about the time that George Washington won the Revolutionary War, and he died at his home in the Hudson Valley about a month after John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). His life neatly spans and represents the promise and the ambitions of the first phase of American nationhood. He was the first American writer to be celebrated in both America and Europe, as well as one of the first to earn his living by writing. Although the subjects of his works—which include a five-volume biography of George Washington (for whom he was named and to whom he was introduced as a child), a biography of English writer Oliver Goldsmith, and a book about Mohammed—were varied, and although he lived and worked in Europe for seventeen years (from 1815 to 1832), Irving is best known for capturing the mysterious atmosphere of the Hudson Valley in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, which became culture-defining tales of American life almost instantly upon their publication in 1819, when Irving was thirty-six.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) descended from some of the earliest Massachusetts Bay colonists. He went to Bowdoin College in Maine, and lived for most of the rest of his life in Massachusetts, except for seven years in Europe, four of which he spent in England as a consul of the Franklin Pierce administration. Hawthorne’s most famous works are novels—The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables—but in addition to completing three other novels, he published several volumes of tales and short stories. Like The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown and The Minister’s Black Veil explore the implications of the beliefs of early Massachusetts Puritans in witchcraft, sin, and the natural evil of human nature (Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather was John Hathorne, the only judge at the Salem witch trials who expressed no regret for his actions). Like Irving’s stories, these tales explore states of mind as they are affected by local geography and local belief systems.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was also born in Massachusetts, but he was orphaned at an early age and taken in by Virginia relatives. He lived and worked in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In 1849, while traveling from Richmond, Virginia, to New York City, he disappeared, and then was found delirious on a street in Baltimore and put into a for-profit hospital, where he died four days later. Searches for a death certificate have been unsuccessful. Poe’s death certainly fits in well with his work, both his poems and his short stories, which partake of and expand the gothic horror tradition popular in the United States and the United Kingdom during his time. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher are narrated in the first person and explore extreme states of mind that lead to crimes that seem to their perpetrators like inevitable actions. The Purloined Letter, set in Paris, revolves around protodetective C. Auguste Dupin, who solves mysteries by using both logic and empathy. The forerunner of Sherlock Holmes and the fictional amateur detective in general, Dupin appears in three of Poe’s stories.

Herman Melville (1819–1891) dedicated Moby-Dick, his most famous work, to Nathaniel Hawthorne after he read and was inspired by Mosses from an Old Manse and then met Hawthorne in 1850 in Lenox, Massachusetts. Melville, the descendant of both a prominent Boston family and a prominent Hudson Valley Dutch family, was born in New York City. His father went bankrupt when he was eleven, and he made his first voyage to Liverpool when he was twenty. He spent almost four years working on whaling ships in the Pacific (including a desertion at the Marquesas Islands, which resulted in his first published novel, Typee). From the time of his return to his death, he wrote and published nine novels (an additional one was published posthumously), more than a dozen short stories, and several collections of poetry. Bartleby, the Scrivener, now one of his most famous short stories, was published in 1853. Although Melville achieved great success and renown early in his career, his work was entirely obscure by the time of his death, only to be revived in the 1920s upon the publication of Billy Budd, which had not been published in his lifetime. He has since come to be considered a major—or, indeed, the major—American novelist.

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) had an interesting and complex career. The daughter of transcendentalists and reformers Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott, she was born in Philadelphia and moved to Massachusetts as a child. Her most famous novels are Little Women and Jo’s Boys, based on some of her childhood experiences, but she also wrote three novels under her pseudonym, A. M. Barnard, that were passionate and daring for their day. Along with the rest of her family, she was an ardent abolitionist, and she served as a nurse during the Civil War. My Contraband was published in the November 1863 issue of the Atlantic, as well as in her collection of that year, Hospital Sketches. Her books about the March family were highly successful, and she was a well-known member of the first group of American women authors to deal straightforwardly with women’s issues of freedom, ambition, and self-realization. She cared for her father for her entire life, and died two days after he did, possibly of lupus erythematosus.

Mark Twain (1835–1910) was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the first of our writers to be born outside the Northeast (though he lived in Connecticut for most of his adult life). He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, and became a great traveler at an early age, working as a pilot on a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River, then heading west to California to prospect for gold, and after that, voyaging to Hawaii and Europe. He wrote more than ten novels—including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Prince and the Pauper—and published many short-story collections and works of nonfiction, an example of the latter being Life on the Mississippi. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was one of his first published stories—and his first great success. An adept speaker, he became an important and popular public figure and, perhaps, the emblem of American culture in his time. In 1895, when he was in his early sixties and not well, he set off on a paid lecture tour, traveling to Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India, Mauritius, South Africa, and England. Popular as a satirist and a humorist, he was outspoken about the political and religious controversies of his day. His political views became more radical as he got older, and he repeatedly challenged received ideas about how Americans should think of themselves and their role in the world.

Bret Harte (1836–1902) was born in Albany, New York, but moved to northern California when he was seventeen. He began his writing career in California and made his first splash with an article about the 1860 massacre of a large group of Wiyot people living on an island in Humboldt Bay. He lived and wrote in California until 1871, when he moved east and began writing for the Atlantic. In 1878, he moved to Europe, where he lived for the next twenty-four years. He was a prolific author of both poetry and prose, but his most famous works remain his early stories about California during the gold rush.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913/14?) was thought by his contemporaries to have written some of the best stories about the Civil War, with An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge considered to be his finest. One of thirteen children, he was born in Ohio. He enlisted in the Union army in 1861 and served until 1865, fighting in the Battle of Shiloh and the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain (in which he was wounded). After the war, he joined a military expedition across the western plains and ended up in San Francisco, where he lived off and on for most of the rest of his life (he spent three years in England and a year in Dakota Territory). He was an active and provocative journalist for the Hearst newspapers. Other than his Civil War stories, his best-known work is a satiric commentary, The Devil’s Dictionary. In 1913, on a tour of Civil War battlefields, he found himself in Ciudad Juárez, where he encountered Pancho Villa. He decided to join Villa’s band to do some firsthand reporting on the Mexican Civil War. He subsequently disappeared and may have been shot by a Mexican firing squad; the circumstances and date of his death are not known for certain.

Henry James (1843–1916) wrote twenty finished and two unfinished novels, plus countless short stories and novellas, as well as plays, essays, and pieces of literary criticism. One of his greatest achievements was a contemplation of his own work, written as introductions to the New York Edition of his collected works. Born into a wealthy and educated New York family, he felt from earliest childhood as at home in Europe as in New York, and he eventually gained British citizenship. James set out to become a complete man of letters, and his works have been very influential, spawning not only a great deal of scholarship, but also many movies, an opera, and several novels and stories by other authors. Most of his works of fiction concern wealthy Americans in Europe attempting to navigate the complexities of European mores. The most famous of them are The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. He wrote several novellas in the gothic tradition, most notably The Turn of the Screw. The Real Right Thing and The Beast in the Jungle are characteristic of James in the way that they probe the inner lives of people who on the surface seem quiet and cosmopolitan, but who avoid deep connection with others. James often uses paradox—characters seek out and achieve what they want to achieve only to discover that they have failed to understand the real meaning and true gifts of human existence.

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) was born in South Berwick, Maine, where she lived for most of her life. Esteemed as a stylist, she wrote both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, has always been much admired, but her circumscribed setting—southern Maine—and her penchant for writing about the apparently quiet, but actually dramatic, lives of small-town and rural women meant that for many decades her work was seen as regional and not especially ambitious. As we see in A White Heron, she had a brilliant eye for the natural world, something she developed as a child when she was made to go on daily walks as an antidote for rheumatoid arthritis. In her thirties, she began to live in Boston and in Europe, and was a vital member of the transatlantic literary scene of that time.

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was Jewett’s almost exact contemporary. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to an Irish father and a St. Louis French mother. She married into a New Orleans family at twenty, and moved to Louisiana, first to New Orleans, and then to a town in Natchitoches Parish, where her husband owned a plantation. Her husband soon died, however, leaving a great deal of debt. She moved back to St. Louis and began writing in an effort to relieve depression. Her most famous novel, The Awakening, offended many contemporaries with its straightforward depiction of the stresses and strains of traditional marriage and of traditional expectations of women. Scandalous for the time, it quickly went out of print, but it was revived in the 1960s and 1970s as a prescient feminist text. Athénaïse explores some of the same themes—the title character cannot fit into the submissive role expected of her by her parents and husband, but she can’t quite imagine what else to do with herself. She rebels and runs away only to embrace her life once she gives birth to a child.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) was one of the most successful women writers of her day. She wrote numerous stories and essays, as well as many novels and a few plays. She also wrote poetry and children’s literature. She lived most of her life in Randolph, Massachusetts, and Brattleboro, Vermont, supporting herself and her family with her work. Her books of stories were acclaimed for their style, as well as their insights into the lives of rural New England women. Many of her female characters (as in the especially well-known story A New England Nun) seem to live quiet lives in accordance with the expectations of the small-town citizens around them, but they are independent-minded and view their neighbors with amused skepticism. Freeman married at forty-nine and moved to Metuchen, New Jersey, but she continued to write about New England. Along with Edith Wharton, she was one of the first two women to be inducted into what is now called the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Revolt of ‘Mother’ reflects her canny understanding of family politics, as well as her quiet sense of humor.

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) took as his subject the lives of black people in the late nineteenth century. He wrote many thoughtful and ironic short stories that were published in prominent magazines that discussed race in the post–Civil War United States, especially in the South (his family was from Fayetteville, North Carolina). His sharper and more political novels, especially his 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, about the white supremacist overthrow of the elected city government of Wilmington, North Carolina, which had taken place in 1898 and resulted in the killings of an unknown number of black citizens, as well as the subsequent passage of severe Jim Crow laws. After 1905, Chesnutt stopped writing, devoting himself instead to his legal stenography business in New York, though he remained politically active and outspoken for the rest of his life. The Wife of His Youth reflects on the experience of a slave’s life that evolves into a valued but risky and circumscribed freedom.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was one of the most active, creative, and daring advocates for women’s rights of her day, and her work is still very influential. She was the great-niece on her father’s side of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, and Catharine Beecher—the famous pre–Civil War progressive activists—and she spent part of her childhood living with the Beechers. The source of her best-known short story, The Yellow Wall-Paper, was her experience of postpartum psychosis upon the birth of her daughter. She eventually divorced her husband, artist Charles Walter Stetson. In addition to writing nearly two hundred short stories and giving close to one hundred lectures, she wrote several novels, novellas, and works of nonfiction (an example of the latter being Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution), as well as diaries and journals. Much of her work was published in the Forerunner, a monthly magazine that she founded and edited between 1909 and 1916. She lived in California, New York, and Connecticut. After being diagnosed with incurable breast cancer, she killed herself at the age of seventy-five.

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) did not begin her literary career until her late thirties, but she made up for her late start by being exceptionally productive, producing close to fifty books before her death at the age of seventy-five. Her most famous novels are The Age of Innocence, which won the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction awarded to a woman, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome. She was born into a very wealthy and socially prominent New York family and, when she was in her forties, became a close friend of Henry James. Her subject matter, like his, often concerns the complications and conflicts of social respectability in the pre–World War I Gilded Age, but Ethan Frome, often read by high school students, and Summer take place in the much different social milieu of hardscrabble rural Massachusetts. She built an estate, completed in 1902, in Lenox, Massachusetts, and spent many years in France, which is where she died of a stroke in 1937. At the start of World War I, she devoted herself to charitable efforts on behalf of refugees from the war, and sometimes traveled to the front lines, which she wrote about after the war. Autres Temps reflects upon changes in social respectability between generations through the eyes of a woman who was once at the center of a famous scandal, while The Other Two concerns a man who comes to accept, and maybe appreciate, the presence in his life of his wife’s two previous husbands.

O. Henry (1862–1910) was the pen name of William Sydney Porter, who was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, during the Civil War. In 1882, he moved to Texas, where he spent his twenties working at many different types of jobs. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, he started his own magazine, a weekly. He also worked in a bank, but he was accused of embezzlement, for which he was eventually tried and sent to federal prison in Ohio. It was there that he began sending his stories under his pseudonym to national magazines, and they soon created a sensation for their clever style and imaginative plot twists. In prison, Porter may never have actually been confined to his cell—he worked in the prison hospital as a pharmacist. After his early release (for good behavior), he moved to New York, where he wrote and published a story a day for an entire year. His oeuvre eventually amounted to hundreds of stories, many of which were published in ten volumes between 1904 and 1910. The Ransom of Red Chief and The Gift of the Magi demonstrate O. Henry’s essentially comic and ironic signature qualities—not only inventive plotting and insight into character, but a broad knowledge of American life, in many regions and among all sorts of people.

Stephen Crane (1871–1900), born in Newark, New Jersey, the last of fourteen children, was twenty-eight when he died, but he had already produced five novels (an additional novel was completed by Robert Barr and published posthumously), seven books of stories, and three books of poetry. His most famous novel is The Red Badge of Courage, a remarkable feat of empathy set in the Civil War. Though Crane was born after the war, he used first-person accounts and, possibly, interviews with veterans to gain insight into his soldier protagonist’s state of mind. When Crane was twenty-one, he wrote his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a work in the naturalist tradition that graphically portrays the difficult and impoverished life of a young girl driven to prostitution and death by her circumstances. Crane’s story The Open Boat, his most famous, was based on a shipwreck he experienced off the coast of Florida when he was on his way to report on the Cuban revolution in 1897. He also reported on the Greco-Turkish War, as well as on Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, again in Cuba. He died of tuberculosis.

Jack London (1876–1916) was born in San Francisco to a single mother. He was given the name John Griffith Chaney, but changed his last name to London when his mother married a Civil War veteran of that name. In college, he contacted his birth father. When William Chaney disclaimed paternity, London, in his grief, dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley and headed for Alaska, the site of a gold rush. It was there that he wrote or was inspired to write many of his best-known stories and novels, including To Build a Fire and The Call of the Wild. He moved back to California, first to Oakland, then to Piedmont, then to a ranch in Sonoma, where he hoped to employ eco-friendly sustainable techniques. Once he bought the ranch, he wrote a good deal of popular fiction in order to support it. London’s other books include The Sea Wolf, White Fang (set in the Yukon), and The Cruise of the Snark, a nonfiction account of London’s 1907 voyage with his wife and several friends to Hawaii and Australia. London suffered from alcoholism and the aftereffects of several serious illnesses. He was said to have committed suicide, but it is more likely he died of uremic poisoning.

Willa Cather (1873–1947) was born in Virginia, but moved at an early age to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where several of her most famous works—including O Pioneers!—are set. While she was in college, the publication of an essay she wrote about English writer Thomas Carlyle persuaded her to change her ambition of becoming a doctor to becoming a writer, and about a year after graduation, she went to work for a women’s magazine based in Pittsburgh. She later taught high school there and wrote for the local newspaper. She was then offered a position at McClure’s, a prestigious publication based in New York City, where she moved in 1906. In 1923, she received the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel now regarded as less significant than those of her prairie trilogy or Death Comes for the Archbishop, the latter a historical novel set in New Mexico territory. She also wrote a well-received historical novel set in seventeenth-century Quebec, Shadows on the Rock. Cather was known for her ability to set her characters into particular environments and trace how the characters and their worlds created and destroyed each other. In Paul’s Case, an adolescent’s driving ambition to escape the dull life that he leads in school ends in a tragedy that Cather makes sure the reader understands but also deplores. In A Sculptor’s Funeral, Cather explores the narrowness of American small-town life when a young man accompanies the body of his friend and artistic mentor back to his hometown in Kansas, where he is still laughed at, although he has made himself a sculptor of renown in New York.

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) moved to Clyde, Ohio, when he was eight years old and subsequently set his most famous work—a short-story cycle about small-town life, entitled Winesburg, Ohio—in a similar town. His short stories were innovative and influential, better received than his novels. Each one filters sometimes shocking and sometimes trivial events through the mind of a protagonist (usually written in the first person) who is deeply affected by events but not able to control or manipulate them. Anderson was adept at depicting the struggles of average people overwhelmed by the changes that were affecting American life, especially rural life, in his day. He himself struggled to find a place in this world—a few years into his first of four marriages, when he was running two small businesses, he vanished and was found four days later, forty miles away. He died on a cruise, possibly from peritonitis caused by mistakenly ingesting a toothpick.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) became in many ways the first modern writer—he started publishing in his twenties and his stories were wildly popular, but his more serious novels did not sell well enough to support a fashionable transatlantic lifestyle. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he was from respectable midwestern stock, but he embraced Princeton, New York, and eventually, Hollywood. At a young age, he developed a drinking problem, which interfered with his work and family life. He wrote skeptically about the values that he represented to readers, as in The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, in which a highly affluent man will go to any lengths to protect his riches, and in Bernice Bobs her Hair, in which a young woman follows her friends’ suggestions about how to be popular and up-to-date only to be betrayed by them in the end. His wife, Zelda, suffered a mental breakdown in 1930, in France, and was institutionalized there and in various hospitals in the United States. During the late thirties, Fitzgerald went to Hollywood. He died, thinking himself a failure, in 1940. He almost immediately became a cultural icon, representing, rather like the characters in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, tragic lust for a world of wealth and style that is ruthless and shallow, but also glittering and seductive.

Jane Smiley is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Greenlanders, A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Horse Heaven, Moo, and Private Life. She taught literature and creative writing for fifteen years at Iowa State University and now lives in California. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW

WASHINGTON IRVING

(FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF THE LATE DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER.)

A pleasing land of drowsy head it was,

Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;

And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,

Forever flushing round a summer sky.

—CASTLE OF INDOLENCE

IN THE BOSOM OF ONE OF THOSE SPACIOUS COVES WHICH INDENT THE eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail, and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market-town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley, or rather lap of land, among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail, or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.

I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noon time, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around, and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.

From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions; and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole nine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannonball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war; and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper, having been buried in the church-yard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head; and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the church-yard before daybreak.

Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and the spectre is known, at all the country firesides, by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously imbibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure, in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions.

I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud; for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great state of New-York, that population, manners, and customs, remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream; where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current. Though many years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I should not still find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom.

In this by-place of nature, there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane; who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, tarried, in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut; a state which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

His school-house was a low building of one large room, rudely constructed of logs; the windows partly glazed, and partly patched with leaves of old copy-books. It was most ingeniously secured at vacant hours, by a withe twisted in the handle of the door, and stakes set against the window-shutters; so that, though a thief might get in with perfect ease, he would find some embarrassment in getting out; an idea most probably borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the mystery of an eel-pot. The school-house stood in a rather lonely but pleasant situation, just at the foot of a woody hill, with a brook running close by, and a formidable birch tree growing at one end of it. From hence the low murmur of his pupils’ voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard in a drowsy summer’s day, like the hum of a bee-hive; interrupted now and then by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of menace or command; or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch, as he urged some tardy loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge. Truth to say, he was a conscientious man, and ever bore in mind the golden maxim, Spare the rod and spoil the child. Ichabod Crane’s scholars certainly were not spoiled.

I would not have it imagined, however, that he was one of those cruel potentates of the school, who joy in the smart of their subjects; on the contrary, he administered justice with discrimination rather than severity; taking the burthen off the backs of the weak, and laying it on those of the strong. Your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the rod, was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of justice were satisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little, tough, wrong-headed, broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled and grew dogged and sullen beneath the birch. All this he called doing his duty by their parents; and he never inflicted a chastisement without following it by the assurance, so consolatory to the smarting urchin, that he would remember it and thank him for it the longest day he had to live.

When school hours were over, he was even the companion and playmate of the larger boys; and on holiday afternoons would convoy some of the smaller ones home, who happened to have pretty sisters, or good housewives for mothers, noted for the comforts of the cupboard. Indeed it behooved him to keep on good terms with his pupils. The revenue arising from his school was small, and would have been scarcely sufficient to furnish him with daily bread, for he was a huge feeder, and though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda; but to help out his maintenance, he was, according to country custom in those parts, boarded and lodged at the houses of the farmers, whose children he instructed. With these he lived successively a week at a time; thus going the rounds of the neighborhood, with all his worldly effects tied up in a cotton handkerchief.

That all this might not be too onerous on the purses of his rustic patrons, who are apt to consider the costs of schooling a grievous burden, and schoolmasters as mere drones, he had various ways of rendering himself both useful and agreeable. He assisted the farmers occasionally in the lighter labors of their farms; helped to make hay; mended the fences; took the horses to water; drove the cows from pasture; and cut wood for the winter fire. He laid aside, too, all the dominant dignity and absolute sway with which he lorded it in his little empire, the school, and became wonderfully gentle and ingratiating. He found favor in the eyes of the mothers, by petting the children, particularly the youngest; and like the lion bold, which whilom so magnanimously the lamb did hold, he would sit with a child on one knee, and rock a cradle with his foot for whole hours together.

In addition to his other vocations, he was the singing-master of the neighborhood, and picked up many bright shillings by instructing the young folks in psalmody. It was a matter of no little vanity to him, on Sundays, to take his station in front of the church gallery, with a band of chosen singers; where, in his own mind, he completely carried away the palm from the parson. Certain it is, his voice resounded far above all the rest of the congregation; and there are peculiar quavers still to be heard in that church, and which may even be heard half a mile off, quite to the opposite side of the mill-pond, on a still Sunday morning, which are said to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod Crane. Thus, by diverse little make-shifts, in that ingenious way which is commonly denominated by hook and by crook, the worthy pedagogue got on tolerably enough, and was thought, by all who understood nothing of the labor of headwork, to have a wonderfully easy life of it.

The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver tea-pot. Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the church-yard, between services on Sundays! gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overrun the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent mill-pond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.

From his half itinerant life, also, he was a kind of traveling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house; so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.

He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spell-bound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, bordering the little brook that whimpered by his school-house, and there con over old Mather’s direful tales, until the gathering dusk of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hill-side; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screech-owl or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fire-flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch’s token. His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought, or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes; and the good people of Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled with awe, at hearing his nasal melody, in linked sweetness long drawn out, floating from the distant hill, or along the dusky road.

Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was, to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvelous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten them wofully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!

But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in the chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show its face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful look did he eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from some distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path! How often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet; and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him! and how often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of his nightly scourings!

All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in diverse shapes, in his lonely perambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was—a woman.

Among the musical disciples who assembled, one evening in each week, to receive his instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy-checked as one of her father’s peaches, and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was withal a little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set off her charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold, which her great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam; the tempting stomacher of the olden time; and withal a provokingly short petticoat, to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round.

Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex; and it is not to be wondered at, that so tempting a morsel soon found favor in his eyes; more especially after he had visited her in her paternal mansion. Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those every thing was snug, happy, and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with his wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty abundance, rather than the style in which he lived. His stronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks, in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm-tree spread its broad branches over it; at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well, formed of a barrel; and then stole sparkling away through the grass, to a neighboring brook, that bubbled along among alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farmhouse was a vast barn, that might have served for a church; every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm; the flail was busily resounding within it from morning to night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings, or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling, and cooing, and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. Sleek unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens; whence sallied forth, now and then, troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air. A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farm-yard, and guinea fowls fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish discontented cry. Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished wings, and crowing in the pride and gladness of his heart—sometimes tearing up the earth with his feet, and then generously calling his ever-hungry family of wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered.

The pedagogue’s mouth watered, as he looked upon his sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind’s eye, he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy: and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples; with a decent competency of onion sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side-dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living.

As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burthened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where.

When he entered the house the conquest of his heart was complete. It was one of those spacious farmhouses, with high-ridged, but lowly sloping roofs, built in the style handed down from the first Dutch settlers; the low projecting eaves forming a piazza along the front, capable of being closed up in bad weather. Under this were hung flails, harness, various utensils of husbandry, and nets for fishing in the neighboring river. Benches were built along the sides for summer use; and a great spinning-wheel at one end, and a churn at the other, showed the various uses to which this important porch might be devoted. From this piazza the wondering Ichabod entered the hall, which formed the centre of the mansion and the place of usual residence. Here, rows of resplendent pewter, ranged on a long dresser, dazzled his eyes. In one corner stood a huge bag of wool ready to be spun; in another a quantity of linsey-woolsey just from the loom; ears of Indian corn, and strings of dried apples and peaches, hung in gay festoons along the walls, mingled with the gaud of red peppers; and a door left ajar gave him a peep into the best parlor, where the claw-footed chairs, and dark mahogany tables, shone like mirrors; andirons, with their accompanying shovel and tongs, glistened from their covert of asparagus tops; mock oranges and conch-shells decorated the mantel-piece; strings of various-colored birds’ eggs were suspended above it; a great ostrich egg was hung from the centre of the room, and a corner cupboard, knowingly left open, displayed immense treasures of old silver and well-mended china.

From the moment Ichabod laid his eyes upon these regions of delight, the peace of his mind was at an end, and his only study was how to gain the affections of the peerless daughter of Van Tassel. In this enterprise, however, he had more real difficulties than generally fell to the lot of a knight-errant of yore, who seldom had any thing but giants, enchanters, fiery dragons, and such like easily conquered adversaries, to contend with; and had to make his way merely through gates of iron and brass, and walls of adamant, to the castle keep, where the lady of his heart was confined; all which he achieved as easily as a man would carve his way to the centre of a Christmas pie; and then the lady gave him her hand as a matter of course. Ichabod, on the contrary, had to win his way to the heart of a country coquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices, which were forever presenting new difficulties and impediments; and he had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers, who beset every portal to her heart; keeping a watchful and angry eye upon each other, but ready to fly out in the common cause against any new competitor.

Among these the most formidable was a burly, roaring, roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood. He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff, but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance. From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb, he had received the nickname of BROM BONES, by which he was universally known. He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dextrous on horseback as a Tartar. He was foremost at all races and cock-fights; and, with the ascendency which bodily strength acquires in rustic life, was the umpire in all disputes, setting his hat on one side, and giving his decisions with an air and tone admitting of no gainsay or appeal. He was always ready for either a fight or a frolic; but had more mischief than ill-will in his composition; and, with all his overbearing roughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good humor at bottom. He had three or four boon companions, who regarded him as their model, and at the head of whom he scoured the country, attending every scene of feud or merriment for miles round. In cold weather he was distinguished by a fur cap, surmounted with a flaunting fox’s tail; and when the folks at a country gathering descried this well-known crest at a distance, whisking about among a squad of hard riders, they always stood by for a squall. Sometimes his crew would be heard dashing along past the farmhouses at midnight, with hoop and halloo, like a troop of Don Cossacks; and the old dames, startled out of their sleep, would listen for a moment till the hurry-scurry had clattered by, and then exclaim, Ay, there goes Brom Bones and his gang! The neighbors looked upon him with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good will; and when any madcap prank, or rustic brawl, occurred in the vicinity, always shook their heads, and warranted Brom Bones was at the bottom of it.

This rantipole hero had for some time singled out the blooming Katrina for the object of his uncouth gallantries, and though his amorous toyings were something like the gentle caresses and endearments of a bear, yet it was whispered that she did not altogether discourage his hopes. Certain it is, his advances were signals for rival candidates to retire, who felt no inclination to cross a lion in his amours; insomuch, that when his horse was seen tied to Van Tassel’s paling, on a Sunday night, a sure sign that his master was courting, or, as it is termed, sparking, within, all other suitors passed by in despair, and carried the war into other quarters.

Such was the formidable rival with whom Ichabod Crane had to contend, and, considering all things, a stouter man than he would have shrunk from the competition, and a wiser man would have despaired. He had, however, a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in his nature; he was in form and spirit like a supple-jack—yielding, but tough; though he bent, he never broke; and though he bowed beneath the slightest pressure, yet, the moment it was away—jerk! he was as erect, and carried his head as high as