SOURCE: Griffith, George V. “John Galt's Short Fiction Series.” Studies in Short Fiction 17, no. 4 (fall 1980): 455-62.

In the following essay, Griffith considers generic difficulties related to Galt's fiction and his role in the early formation of the realist short story.

When Brander Matthews proclaimed the existence of the short story in 1884, he created a literary problem as much historical as generic, for in defining the genre he placed it in literary history and thus set off the search for literary precedents. The search has been particularly fruitful in Studies in Short Fiction, yielding virtually a complete history of English short fiction.¹ Yet it has been slightly evasive as well, many of the studies implicitly denying Matthews' assertion by subtly shifting from short story to short fiction, thus subsuming the generic problem in the historical. The search is then conducted along lines already laid down by the history of...