The beginnings of the American short story: Washington Irving
Romance, allegory, and morality: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
Terror, mystery, and ratiocination: Edgar Allen Poe
Local color and Western humor: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
The regional story in New England, the South, and the Middle West: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Hamlin Garland, and others
The rise of the journalistic short story: O. Henry and his predecessors
The short story as fine art: Henry James
The short story in transition: Stephen Crane, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser
The liberation of the short story: Sherwood Anderson
Short-story writers of the 1920s: Wilbur Daniel Steele, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Conrad Aiken, and Stephen Vincent Benét
The discovery of a style: Ernest Hemingway
Virtuoso storyteller: William Faulkner
Social protest and other themes in the short story, 1930 to 1940: Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and Kay Boyle
Symbolism and sensibility: Katherine Anne Porter
The short story since 1940: Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, J.F. Powers, J.D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O'Connor.