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Every short story has three parts, which may be called Setting or Background, Plot or
Plan, and Characters or Character. If you are going to write a short story, as I hope you
are, you will find it necessary to think through these three parts so as to relate them
interestingly and naturally one to the other; and if you want to assimilate the best that is
in the following stories, you will do well to approach them by the same three routes.
The Setting or Background gives us the time and the place of the story with such details
of custom, scenery, and dialect as time and place imply. It answers the questions When?
Where? The Plot tells us what happened. It gives us the incidents and events, the haps or
mishaps, that are interwoven to make up the warp and woof of the story. Sometimes there
is hardly any interweaving; just a plain plan or simple outline is followed, as in „The
Christmas Carol„ or „The Great Stone Face.„ We may still call the core of these two
stories the Plot, if we want to, but Plan would be the more accurate. This part of the story
answers the question What? Under the heading Characters or Character we study the
personalities of the men and women who move through the story and give it unity and
coherence. Sometimes, as in „The Christmas Carol„ or „Markheim,„ one character so
dominates the others that they are mere spokes in his hub or incidents in his career. But in
„The Gift of the Magi,„ though more space is given to Della, she and Jim act from the
same motive and contribute equally to the development of the story. In one of our stories
the main character is a dog, but he is so human that we may still say that the chief
question to be answered under this heading is Who?
I. ESTHER, From the Old Testament
II. THE HISTORY OF ALI BABA AND THE FORTY ROBBERS, From „The
Arabian Nights„
III. RIP VAN WINKLE, By Washington Irving
IV. THE GOLD-BUG, By Edgar Allan Poe
V. A CHRISTMAS CAROL, By Charles Dickens
VI. THE GREAT STONE FACE, By Nathaniel Hawthorne
VII. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS, By Dr. John Brown
VIII. THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT, By Bret Harte
IX. MARKHEIM, By Robert Louis Stevenson
X. THE NECKLACE, By Guy de Maupassant
XI. THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, By Rudyard Kipling
XII. THE GIFT OF THE MAGI, By O. Henry
SHORT STORIES
I. ESTHER
From the Old Testament, Authorized Version.
AUTHOR UNKNOWN
Setting. The events take place in Susa, the capital of Persia, in the reign of Ahasuerus, or
Xerxes (485-465 B.C.). This foreign locale intensifies the splendid Jewish patriotism that
breathes through the story from beginning to end. If the setting had been in Jerusalem,
