Description

Short Stories for English Courses by Rosa Mary Redding Mikels

317 pages 

Why must we confine the reading of our children to the older literary classics? This is the
question asked by an ever- increasing number of thoughtful teachers. They have no wish to
displace or to discredit the classics. On the contrary, they love and revere them. But they do
wish to give their pupils something additional, something that pulses with present life, that
is characteristic of to-day. The children, too, wonder that, with the great literary outpouring
going on about them, they must always fill their cups from the cisterns of the past.
The short story is especially adapted to supplement our high- school reading. It is of a
piece with our varied, hurried, efficient American life, wherein figure the business man’s
lunch, the dictagraph, the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and the railway
“limited.” It has achieved high art, yet conforms to the modern demand that our
literature—since it must be read with despatch, if read at all—be compact and compelling.
Moreover, the short story is with us in almost overwhelming numbers, and is probably
here to stay. Indeed, our boys and girls are somewhat appalled at the quantity of material
from which they must select their reading, and welcome any instruction that enables them
to know the good from the bad. It is certain, therefore, that, whatever else they may throw
into the educational discard when they leave the high school, they will keep and use
anything they may have learned about this form of literature which has become so
powerful a factor in our daily life.
This book does not attempt to select the greatest stories of the time. What tribunal would
dare make such a choice? Nor does it attempt to trace the evolution of the short story or to
point out natural types and differences. These topics are better suited to college classes. Its
object is threefold: to supply interesting reading belonging to the student’s own time, to
help him to see that there is no divorce between classic and modern literature, and, by
offering him material structurally good and typical of the qualities represented, to assist
him in discriminating between the artistic and the inartistic. The stories have been
carefully selected, because in the period of adolescence “nothing read fails to leave its
mark”; [Footnote: G Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. II.] they have also been carefully
arranged with a view to the needs of the adolescent boy and girl. Stories of the type loved
by primitive man, and therefore easily approached and understood, have been placed first.
Those which appealed in periods of higher development follow, roughly in the order of
their increasing difficulty. It is hoped, moreover, that this arrangement will help the
student to understand and appreciate the development of the story. He begins with the
simple tale of adventure and the simple story of character. As he advances he sees the story
develop in plot, in character analysis, and in setting, until he ends with the psychological
study of Markheim, remarkable for its complexity of motives and its great spiritual
problem. Both the selection and the arrangement have been made with this further
purpose in view— “to keep the heart warm, reinforcing all its good motives, preforming
choices, universalizing sympathies.”