SOURCE: Sullivan, Edward D. Maupassant: The Short Stories, pp. 7-35. London: Edward Arnold, 1962.

In the following excerpt, Sullivan categorizes Guy de Maupassant's short fiction.

1. Introduction

The world created by a short-story writer has its own coherence, its own identifying characteristics, its own structure, but when we try to examine it closely we are faced with a set of problems that are quite different from those involved in the analysis of an individual play, a short novel, or even a volume of poetry. Guy de Maupassant wrote over 300 short stories in a period of about ten years, roughly between 1880 and 1890; and, while it would be convenient if we could take one story and show that it embodies the characteristics of all the others, to do so would produce something either highly artificial or hopelessly misleading. Maupassant wrote many different kinds of stories—different in subject, in length, in technique...