SOURCE: "Plain and/or Fancy: Where the Short Story Is and May Be Going," in The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story, edited by Wendell M. Aycock, Texas Tech Press, 1982, pp. 133-41.

In the following essay, Garrett comments on the short story, examining the history of the genre and predicting its future.

In his Harvard commencement speech of 1978, a speech which outraged a good many prominent people, Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a pertinent remark concerning what he had noticed about intellectual life in the United States:

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those which are not fashionable and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or to be heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the...