Short Story Writers
Short Story Writers Encyclopedia Articles
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Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form...
Truman Capote
Truman Capote was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright whose early writing extended the Southern Gothic tradition, though he later developed a more journalistic approach in the novel...
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the most important and celebrated figure in Spanish literature. His novel Don Quixote has been...
Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver was an American short-story writer and poet whose realistic writings about the working poor mirrored his own life. Carver was the son of a sawmill worker. He married a year after finishing...
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and critic known for her witty—and often acerbic—remarks. She was one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal literary...
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury was an American author best known for his highly imaginative short stories and novels that blend a poetic style, nostalgia for childhood, social criticism, and an awareness of the hazards...
D.H. Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence was an English author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. His novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) made him one...
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer whose works became classics of 20th-century world literature. Borges was reared in the then-shabby Palermo district of Buenos Aires,...
Janet Frame
Janet Frame was a leading New Zealand writer of novels, short fiction, and poetry. Her works were noted for their explorations of alienation and isolation. Frame was born to a railroad worker and a sometime-poet...
Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson is a British short-story writer, playwright, and novelist whose works are known for their complicated plots, experimental form, and often eccentric characters. Atkinson received her early...
Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros is an American short-story writer and poet best known for her groundbreaking evocation of Mexican American life in Chicago. After graduating from Chicago’s Loyola University (B.A., 1976),...
Isaac Babel
Isaac Babel was a Russian short-story writer known for his cycles of stories: Konarmiya (1926, rev. ed. 1931, enlarged 1933; Red Cavalry), set in the Russo-Polish War (1919–20); Odesskiye rasskazy (1931;...
Aleksandr Pushkin
Aleksandr Pushkin was a Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin’s father...
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a German-language writer of visionary fiction whose works—especially the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis)—express the anxieties...
Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev was a Russian novelist, poet, and playwright whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On...
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. He was a literary artist of laconic precision who probed below the surface of life, laying bare the secret motives of his characters....
John Cheever
John Cheever was an American short-story writer and novelist whose work describes, often through fantasy and ironic comedy, the life, manners, and morals of middle-class suburban America. Cheever has been...
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was an English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story “Heart of...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had...
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were...
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is an American writer noted for her idiosyncratic and extremely short stories often characterized by vivid observations of mostly mundane and routine occurrences. Davis grew up surrounded by...
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson was an American novelist and short-story writer best known for her story “The Lottery” (1948). Jackson graduated from Syracuse University in 1940 and married the American literary critic...
William Faulkner
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...