In the tale, or "story of incident," the focus of interest is on the course and outcome of the events, as in Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug (1843) and in other tales of detection, in many of the stories of O. Henry (1862-1910), and in the stock but sometimes well-contrived western and adventure stories in popular magazines. "Stories of character" focus instead on the state of mind and motivation, or on the psychological and moral qualities, of the protagonists. In some of the stories of character by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the Russian master of the form, nothing more happens than an encounter and conversation between two people. Ernest Hemingway's classic "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" consists only of a curt conversation between two waiters about an old man who each day gets drunk and stays on in the café until it closes, followed by a brief meditation on the part of one of the waiters. In some stories there is a balance of interest between external action and character. Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is as violent in its packed events as any sensational adventure-tale, but every particular of the action and dialogue is contrived to test and reveal, with a surprising set of reversals,the moral quality of all three protagonists.

The short story differs from the novel in the dimension that Aristotle called "magnitude," and this limitation of length imposes differences both in the effects that the story can achieve and in the choice, elaboration, and management of the elements to achieve those effects. Edgar Allan Poe, who is sometimes called the originator of the short story as an established genre, was at any rate its first critical theorist. He defined what he called "the prose tale" as a narrative which can be read at one sitting of from half an hour to two hours, and is limited to "a certain unique or single effect" to which every detail is subordinate (Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, 1842). Poe's comment applies to many short stories, and points to the economy of management which the tightness of the form always imposes in some degree. We can say that, by and large, the short story writer introduces a very limited number of persons, cannot afford the space for the leisurely analysis and sustained development of character, and cannot undertake to develop as dense and detailed a social milieu as does the novelist. The author often begins the story close to, or even on the verge of, the climax, minimizes both prior exposition and the details of the setting, keeps the complications down, and clears up the denouement quickly—sometimes in a few sentences. (See plot) The central incident is often selected to manifest as much as possible of the protagonist's life and character, and the details are devised to carry maximum import for the development of the plot. This spareness in the narrative often gives the artistry in a good short story higher visibility than the artistry in the more capacious and loosely structured novel.

Many distinguished short stories depart from this paradigm in various ways. It must be remembered that the name covers a great diversity of prose fiction, all the way from the short short story, which is a slightly elaborated anecdote of perhaps five hundred words, to such long and complex forms as Herman Melville's Billy Budd (c. 1890), Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), and Thomas Mann's Mano and the Magician (1930). In such works, the status of middle length between the tautness of the short story and the expansiveness of the novel is sometimes indicated by the name novelette, or novella. This form has been especially exploited in Germany (where it is called the Novelle) after it was introduced by Goethe in 1795 and carried on by Heinrich von Kleist and many other writers; the genre has also been the subject of special critical attention by German theorists (see the list of readings below).

The short narrative, in both verse and prose, is one of the oldest and most widespread of literary forms; the Hebrew Bible, for example, includes the stories of Jonah, Ruth, and Esther. Some of the narrative types which preceded the modern short story, treated elsewhere in this Glossary, are the fable, the exemplum, the folktale, the fabliau, and the parable. Early in its history, there developed the device of the frame-story: a preliminary narrative within which one or more of the characters proceeds to tell a series of short narratives. This device was widespread in the oral and written literature of the East and Middle East, as in the collection of stories called The Arabian Nights, and was used by a number of other writers, including Boccaccio for his prose Decameron (1353) and by Chaucer for his versified Canterbury Tales (c. 1387). In the latter instance, Chaucer developed the frame-story of the journey, dialogue, and interactions of the Canterbury pilgrims to such a degree that the frame itself approximated the form of an organized plot. Within Chaucer's frame-plot, each story constitutes a complete and rounded narrative, yet functions also both as a means of characterizing the teller and as a vehicle for the quarrels and topics of argument en route. In its more recent forms, the frame-story may enclose either a single narrative (Henry James' The Turn of the Saew) or a sequence of narratives (Joel Chandler Harris' stories as told by Uncle Remus, 1881 and later; see under beast fable).

The form of prose narrative which approximates the present concept of the short story was developed, beginning in the early nineteenth century, in order to satisfy the need for short fiction by the many magazines (periodical collections of diverse materials, including essays, reviews, verses, and prose stories) that were inaugurated at that time. Among the early practitioners were Washington Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe in America, Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley in England, E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany, Balzac in France, and Gogol, Pushkin, and Turgenev in Russia. Since then, almost all the major novelists in all the European languages have also written notable short stories. The form has flourished especially in America; Frank O'Connor has called it "the national art form," and its American masters include (in addition to the writers mentioned above) Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John O'Hara, J. F. Powers, John Cheever, and J. D. Salinger.

See H. S. Canby, The Short Story in English (1909); Sean O'Faolain, The Short Story (1948, reprinted 1964); Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962); R. L. Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (rev. 1966); Julie Brown, ed., American Women Short Story Writers (1995). On the novella: Ronald Paulson, The Novelette Before 1900 (1968); Mary Doyle Springer, Forms of the Modem Novella (1976); Martin Swales, The German Novelle (1977). On the frame-story and tales in the ancient collection of Arabic stories, see the Introduction to The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy (1990).