Although William Austin wrote only a handful of stories and devoted most of his life to the law and politics, he was quite a popular writer in his time. His best-known story, "Peter Rugg, or the Missing Man," was nearly continuously in print for a century after the appearance of the first part in the 10 September 1824 issue of the New England Galaxy. The early chroniclers of the American short story reserved Austin a small but important role. For example, Henry Seidel Canby, in The Short Story in English (1909), compared Austin's "Peter Rugg" favorably with the tales of Washington Irving, claiming it was "a striking exception, perhaps the only notable instance in America before 1830" in an otherwise undistinguished first decade of American short stories. Elias Lieberman, in The American Short Story (1912), calls Austin and Harriet Beecher Stowe the only two writers in the "pre-modern era" whose "work requires some...