SOURCE: "The Modern Short Story," in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, edited by Donald Pizer, University of Texas Press, 1964, pp. 48-50.

In the following essay, which was first published in 1896, Norris describes the development of the short story form.

There is one type of the modern short story that is a sort of great-grandchild of the novel of fifty years ago, but that, finding no abiding place between the broad covers of a printed book, has been adapted and nurtured by the monthly magazine. Originally the short story was but a miniature novel, having all the features of a novel—introduction, plot, complication, development of character and the like—every characteristic in fact but that of length.

Balzac introduced this type—the type of the long short story, and it still survives in the present day in the form of the serial of two numbers that appears...