The Ten Most Forgotten Short Stories in the English Literary Tradition (1860–1940)
Ten cases that show how literary canons forget, and what the short story loses when they do.
Written & prepared by Longhand Almanac Research · 7 September 2026
The Brief
Ten short stories published between 1860 and 1940 that received documented serious attention in their own moment (prizes, Best-Of selections, praise from named critics) and are absent from the major current anthologies and the standard survey syllabi. Each entry documents the reception, names the mechanism of the forgetting, and links to where the story can be read today. Nine of the ten are free online.
A canon is a set of agreements, most of which the reader never witnesses being made. Anthology editors choose; syllabi narrow; reprint houses calculate; dissertations cluster; reviewers default to the names that already circulate. The short story suffers from this more than the novel does. Novels have spines. Stories live in magazines, yearbooks, and collections that go out of print within a decade and are never reset. A story that misses its generation’s anthology usually misses every anthology that followed, because later editors consult earlier ones. What we call the tradition is often a chain of editorial copying.
This document assembles ten stories that were read seriously in their own time: praised by named critics, awarded prizes, selected for Best Of volumes, imitated by peers. All ten are now absent from the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, the Oxford Book of English and American Short Stories, the Penguin Book of the British Short Story, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and from the reading lists of undergraduate survey courses in American, British, and World literature. Each entry names the mechanism by which a living reputation became an absent one. The mechanisms vary: a family that burned the papers, a magazine whose politics compromised its authors’ afterlives, a prize won by a writer later blacklisted, a translator superseded, a story too violent for its genre slot, a writer who outlived her moment.
The claim here is narrow. These ten are not offered as the greatest works we have forgotten. They are offered because, read together, they show how forgetting works. Each one was good enough to be remembered and was not remembered anyway. Recovering them is an audit of the processes by which a literature decides what it contains.
Longhand Almanac is a search and discovery engine for creative writing published on sites people built themselves. We built it on a premise this list tests backward in time: a great deal of excellent writing is still legible, online and often free, and lacks only the circulation that other work, no better, continues to receive. What follows is the evidence for that premise at its oldest.
Methodology
A story qualified for this list only if we could verify four things. First, that it was published in English, or in English translation, before 1940. Second, that it received documented serious attention in its own moment: a review by a named critic, inclusion in a contemporary prize list or Best Of volume, a letter of praise from a peer, translation into another language. Third, that it is absent from the major current anthologies (Norton, Oxford, Penguin, Library of America, Heath, Norton African American) in their editions of the past thirty years, and absent from the standard undergraduate syllabi we surveyed. Fourth, that a specific, documentable mechanism explains its decline. Obscurity alone does not qualify; obscurity is the condition of most writing.
Where these four conditions converged, we further required that the text be accessible online today. Each entry provides a working URL, and every URL below was opened and read in September 2026.
Several strong candidates were dropped when verification revealed partial recovery: Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” now appears in the Heath Anthology; Pauline Hopkins’s fiction has entered the Norton African American Literature in two stories; Eric Walrond’s “Wharf Rats,” dropped from that anthology’s second edition, was restored in 2014; Vernon Lee has been reprinted by Penguin. We also dropped candidates whose only champion was a single academic edition long out of print, since that represents an incomplete but genuine recovery rather than forgetting.
The list is arranged chronologically. It does not claim to identify the ten “most” forgotten stories in any statistical sense. It identifies ten exemplary cases in which forgetting can be shown rather than asserted.
The Ten Stories
1. “Circumstance” by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1860)
Mechanism: anthology bottleneck · anthology petrifaction · displacement by a close competitor
At publication. “Circumstance” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for May 1860, when Spofford, then publishing as Harriet Prescott, was twenty-five. The story recounts a New England frontier woman held overnight in a tree by a panther, singing continuously to keep the animal from killing her, and it drew immediate attention for its formal extremity. Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson on 25 April 1862 that “I read Miss Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me in the Dark — so I avoided her”: an acknowledgment of power framed as a retreat from it. To her sister-in-law Susan, Dickinson asked to be sent “everything she writes.” William Dean Howells, late in life, honored the story by including it in his 1920 anthology The Great Modern American Stories.
The forgetting. Spofford’s decline is a study in displacement by the very realism her early reviewers assumed she would help inaugurate. When Howells took over the Atlantic he declined to publish her fiction, preferring the cooler vernacular of Jewett and Freeman; Elizabeth Halbeisen’s biography documents the exclusion, and Alfred Bendixen’s 1989 Rutgers edition traces how Spofford’s ornate, gothic, sensory mode was relabeled “decorative” within a generation and then dismissed outright by mid-century realists and modernists alike. The feminist recovery of the 1980s reintroduced Spofford to specialist classrooms through Bendixen’s edition and Elaine Showalter’s work, but the story never entered the current Norton, Oxford, or Library of America rotations, and her presence in earlier Norton editions has since been cut.
Spofford therefore occupies an instructive middle ground: a writer once central enough to be read by Dickinson and reprinted by Howells, pushed out of the canon by a change in literary taste, half-restored by feminist scholarship, then lost again because partial recovery depends on editions going into paperback and staying there. Her case is the pattern in miniature. She has been “recovered” three times and circulates as though she had been.
Why it still matters. “Circumstance” is the rare nineteenth-century American story in which a woman’s voice is the narrative event. The panther is held off only so long as she continues to sing, and the story becomes a sustained meditation on performance as survival. Readers trained on Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, or Carmen Maria Machado will recognize the mode immediately.
Sources. Emily Dickinson, Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, vol. II, L261 (1862). Elizabeth K. Halbeisen, Harriet Prescott Spofford: A Romantic Survival (1935). Alfred Bendixen, Introduction to “The Amber Gods” and Other Stories (Rutgers UP, 1989). Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009).
2. “The Tenth of January” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1868)
Mechanism: political repudiation · anthology petrifaction
At publication. Phelps placed “The Tenth of January” in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1868, when she was twenty-four and simultaneously becoming a household name with The Gates Ajar. The story is a fictionalized account of the Pemberton Mill collapse in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on 10 January 1860, in which the building’s fall and the fire that followed killed workers in numbers period and modern estimates put between 88 and 145, most of them young women. John Greenleaf Whittier, who had known the town, praised the story to Phelps in correspondence; it was reprinted in the period press and became the industrial-disaster fiction of its decade, predating Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle by thirty-eight years. Howells, then at the Atlantic, endorsed Phelps’s industrial writing without reservation.
The forgetting. Twentieth-century literary history collapsed Phelps into “the author of The Gates Ajar,” a spiritualist consolation novel whose fashion waned with the generation that had fought the Civil War. Her industrial fiction was then absorbed into a category, “sentimental reform writing,” that the modernist canon treated as a problem to be avoided. Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977), though not written against Phelps specifically, consolidated the critical vocabulary that kept her out; Carol Farley Kessler’s 1982 Twayne volume and Lisa A. Long’s later work document how the “sentimental” label functioned as a permanent disqualification. The slot Phelps might have occupied in American industrial fiction went instead to Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, which had the advantage of Tillie Olsen’s 1972 Feminist Press recovery and a male protagonist. Phelps retained neither. She is absent from the current Norton, Heath, and Library of America rotations, and the story, arguably the single most compressed piece of American industrial fiction before Crane, is now read only in specialist seminars.
Why it still matters. Phelps renders the collapse in real time, alternating perspectives across the factory floor; the final pages anticipate the close-focus reportage of the 1930s. Read alongside Davis, the story reframes what the American industrial short story could look like when written by a woman who knew the mill towns firsthand.
Sources. Carol Farley Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Twayne, 1982). Elizabeth Duquette and Cheryl Tevlin, eds., Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems (U of Nebraska Press, 2014). Susan S. Williams, Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900 (2006). Jean Fagan Yellin, “The Tenth of January: Fiction and Fact,” New England Quarterly 45 (1972).
3. “Mrs. Flint’s Married Experience” by Rose Terry Cooke (1881)
Mechanism: displacement by a close competitor · one-story tax
At publication. Cooke published widely in the Atlantic, Harper’s, and Putnam’s from the 1850s onward; when Somebody’s Neighbors collected her late stories, reviewers treated her as the grimmer New England counterpart to Sarah Orne Jewett. William Dean Howells, looking back, grouped her with Jewett, Alice Brown, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and wrote that Cooke’s stories “were always so good that I grieve to have them the least forgotten.” The story was controversial enough that reviewers accused it of overstatement; Cooke defended it by citing Torringford, Connecticut, town and church records.
The forgetting. Cooke is the clearest case in this list of a writer dropped for failing to fit either of the two slots later reserved for women regionalists. Jewett was assigned the pastoral slot; Freeman, the stoic-grim slot. Cooke, darker than either (her stories routinely end in the physical destruction of married women), was judged “overdone” by late-nineteenth-century taste, and then, when feminist recovery came in the 1980s, was judged politically inconvenient because she had been an anti-suffragist. Elizabeth Ammons, in her 1986 Rutgers edition “How Celia Changed Her Mind” and Selected Stories, argued that Cooke’s Calvinist naturalism anticipated the next century’s realism more directly than any of her contemporaries. The edition went out of print within a decade. She is absent from the current Norton, Heath, and Library of America anthologies.
A second mechanism compounds the first. Cooke was productive in the 1870s and 1880s, the decades most aggressively pruned by twentieth-century American-literature syllabi, which leap from Hawthorne to the realists. The transitional writers, Spofford, Cooke, Phelps, Stoddard, were not so much rejected as skipped.
Why it still matters. “Mrs. Flint’s Married Experience” is a short, unsparing account of a Connecticut farm wife worked to death by a miserly deacon who resents her food. The prose is tight, plain, and accusatory; the theology is indistinguishable from the indictment. It is the American story “The Revolt of Mother” would have been if Freeman had not blinked.
Sources. Elizabeth Ammons, Introduction to “How Celia Changed Her Mind” and Selected Stories of Rose Terry Cooke (Rutgers UP, 1986). Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (2003). William Dean Howells, Heroines of Fiction (1901), vol. II.
At publication. “Lizerunt,” a three-part novella-in-stories following an East End girl from courtship to pregnancy to her husband’s forcing her into prostitution, was serialized by W. E. Henley in the National Observer before heading Tales of Mean Streets in 1894. Arthur Waugh’s letter to The Critic in 1895 urged American readers to buy the book for what it revealed of “the degradation and misery of a certain side of London life.” The story was violent enough that the Clerkenwell Public Library pulled the volume and W. H. Smith briefly refused to stock it. That act of suppression is itself the period’s clearest testimony to its force.
The forgetting. Morrison’s archive was destroyed on his own instruction: at his death in 1945 his wife burned his notebooks and correspondence, an act of self-erasure documented in John Greenfield’s ODNB entry. But the more decisive mechanism is what we call, in this list, the anthology bottleneck. A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998) represents Morrison by “Behind the Shade,” a short and comparatively decorous piece; Philip Hensher’s Penguin Book of the British Short Story (2015) represents him by the same story. Once a writer is canonized by a single title, later editors consult earlier editors, and the rest of the corpus disappears. “Lizerunt” is the more ambitious, more formally radical, more morally confrontational work, and it is precisely what the anthology apparatus has chosen not to carry.
Morrison’s own later career compounds the effect. He turned to detective stories (the Martin Hewitt series) and then to Japanese-art scholarship, giving later critics reason to file his East End fiction as a phase. The phase was the work.
Why it still matters. “Lizerunt” refuses free indirect sympathy. Its women are not noble, its men are not redeemable, its narrator does not soften. Read forward, it is the ancestor of Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), which Morrison’s prose anticipates by twenty years; read backward, it is what naturalist London fiction looked like when an East End writer, and no Bloomsbury visitor, wrote it.
Sources. John Greenfield, “Arthur Morrison,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971). Stan Newens, Arthur Morrison: The Novelist of Realism in East London and Essex (2008). Arthur Waugh, The Critic, May 1895.
5. “A Dead Woman” by Hubert Crackanthorpe (1893)
Mechanism: premature death without estate · venue collapse
At publication. Crackanthorpe was the most conspicuous of the English Zolaists of the early 1890s; Wreckage (1893) and Sentimental Studies (1895) placed him at the center of the Yellow Book circle around Henry Harland. Henry James supplied an “Appreciation” as preface to the posthumous Last Studies (1897), praising his craftsmanship; Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Arthur Symons wrote of him in periodicals throughout the decade. After Crackanthorpe drowned in the Seine in November 1896 at twenty-six, Richard Le Gallienne called him “the Chatterton of the English novel.”
The forgetting. Four mechanisms converged on Crackanthorpe’s reputation with unusual completeness. His death was recorded as a likely suicide, under scandalous circumstances involving his wife’s affair and an accusation of venereal disease; the Crackanthorpe family, aristocratic landowners in Westmorland, discouraged biographical discussion for decades, as Jad Adams and the ODNB both note. His work was aesthetically tied to the Yellow Book, and after the Wilde trial of May 1895 the market for anything associated with English decadence collapsed inside twelve months. The Zolaesque short story, precise, anti-sentimental, documentary, went out of fashion in English within a generation, replaced first by Edwardian comedy and then by modernism. No living champion carried him into the interwar teaching canon.
Edinburgh University Press’s 2020 scholarly edition of Wreckage and the MHRA’s Selected Writings (2020) are explicit recovery projects; both acknowledge that Crackanthorpe has not circulated outside the seminar since the 1890s. He is absent from Byatt, Hensher, and the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
Why it still matters. “A Dead Woman” is a husband’s muted mourning for a wife he did not love, written in a flat, concessive prose that anticipates Hemingway’s iceberg theory by three decades. Its refusal of consolation is the technical innovation later critics would credit to the Americans.
Sources. Henry James, “Appreciation,” preface to Hubert Crackanthorpe, Last Studies (1897). David Crackanthorpe, Hubert Crackanthorpe and English Realism in the 1890s (1977). William Greenslade, “Naturalism and Decadence: The Case of Hubert Crackanthorpe,” in Decadent Poetics, ed. Hall and Murray (Palgrave, 2013). Jad Adams, Hubert Crackanthorpe: Life and Writings, online at 1890s.ca.
6. “Lieutenant Gustl” (as None But the Brave) by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by Richard L. Simon (German original 1900; first English translation 1926)
At publication. Schnitzler’s Leutnant Gustl appeared in the Vienna Neue Freie Presse on Christmas Day 1900 and was immediately understood in Austria as the first sustained interior monologue in German literature. When Richard L. Simon, co-founder of Simon and Schuster, published a translation of his own as None But the Brave in New York in 1926, the book was reviewed across the American press as a belated recognition; Henry Hatfield later wrote that Schnitzler was “second only to Hofmannsthal among the Austrian writers of his generation and one of the most underrated of German authors.” Reviews appeared in the New York Herald Tribune Books (18 December 1927), the Saturday Review of Literature (3 December 1927), The Dial (January 1928), and Harper’s (April 1928), mostly as part of the omnibus Viennese Novelettes. The story had caused an Austrian military court of honor to strip Schnitzler of his reserve officer’s rank in 1901, a documented act of state suppression with few parallels in the history of the form.
The forgetting. The publication date of Ulysses (1922) is the hinge. Schnitzler’s interior monologue preceded Joyce’s by twenty-two years, but by the time None But the Brave appeared in English, the technique had been canonized as an Anglo-Irish invention. Schnitzler was thus read as a minor precursor to a form he had in fact pioneered. Nazi book burnings in 1933 removed his work from German-language circulation for a generation; postwar Austrian letters treated fin-de-siècle Jewish Vienna as a period to be mourned rather than taught. By the time Schnitzler re-entered English through Penguin’s 1999 Dream Story and Pushkin Press’s later reissues, his shorter fiction had been reduced to the erotic novella Traumnovelle (the Kubrick source) and Fräulein Else. Lieutenant Gustl, the formally originating work, remained uncollected in the current Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Why it still matters. The story is forty-five minutes inside the head of a vain young officer deciding whether to shoot himself after a baker jostles him in a concert-hall cloakroom. Every feature later associated with Joyce and Woolf is already operating: free indirect drift, temporal compression, the collapse of dignity through voice alone. It is the first modernist short story, and English readers can meet it in its first English dress.
Sources. Henry Hatfield, Modern German Literature (1966). Frederick J. Beharriell, “Schnitzler’s Anticipation of Freud’s Dream Theory,” Monatshefte 45 (1953). Konstanze Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler (2005). Austrian Academy of Sciences Schnitzler press archive, schnitzler-zeitungen.acdh.oeaw.ac.at.
7. “The Closing Door” by Angelina Weld Grimké (1919)
Mechanism: venue contamination · political repudiation
At publication. Grimké, better known in her own lifetime for the lynching drama Rachel (1916), placed “The Closing Door” in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review in the autumn of 1919. The story is an anti-lynching narrative whose protagonist, on learning of her brother’s lynching in Georgia, kills her newborn son rather than allow him to grow into a Black man in America. Grimké drew the premise directly from the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, the pregnant Georgia woman whose unborn child was cut from her body and stamped on by a mob. Sanger’s magazine published it as a deliberate intervention in the reproductive-politics argument of the late 1910s.
The forgetting. Three mechanisms converge here with unusual clarity. First, the venue: the Birth Control Review was absorbed into the reproductive-politics archive rather than the literary one, and its fiction pages were not surveyed by the Black anthologists of the 1920s, who were working outward from The Crisis and Opportunity. Second, the subject: infanticide as refusal was too severe for the uplift frame that governed contemporary Black periodical fiction, and too racially specific for the white magazines Grimké also submitted to. Gloria T. Hull’s Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana UP, 1987) documents the editorial dead end. Third, Grimké herself: Hull’s research establishes that Grimké’s closeted lesbian identity and her father Archibald’s exacting respectability politics suppressed much of her fiction during her lifetime and after. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, in its third edition (2014), prints four Grimké poems (“A Winter Twilight,” “The Black Finger,” “When the Green Lies over the Earth,” “Tenebris”) and no fiction.
Why it still matters. “The Closing Door” is the most formally ambitious anti-lynching short story of its decade: a compressed, first-person account in which the narrator becomes a witness to another woman’s reasoning, and the reasoning itself is the argument. Read beside the poetry of Claude McKay and the documentary prose of Walter White, it is the missing third term.
Sources. Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana UP, 1987). Carolivia Herron, ed., Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké (Oxford UP, 1991). Marcy Knopf, ed., The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women (Rutgers UP, 1993). Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching (2011).
8. “The Octave of Jealousy” by Stacy Aumonier (1922)
At publication. Aumonier was a commercial and critical success of the 1910s and 1920s, publishing in The Strand alongside Conan Doyle and Wodehouse and drawing endorsements unusual for a magazinist. John Galsworthy wrote that “Stacy Aumonier is one of the best short-story writers of all time” and predicted he would “outlive all the writers of his day.” Rebecca West praised his work in 1922. James Hilton, asked by Good Housekeeping in March 1939 to name his single favorite short story, chose “The Octave of Jealousy,” and the magazine described it as “a bitterly brilliant tale.” Alfred Hitchcock later adapted several of his stories for television.
The forgetting. Aumonier died of tuberculosis in 1928, at fifty-one, with no academic champion and no literary estate capable of shepherding him into the interwar teaching canon. More decisively, his work was coded by its venues: The Strand, Pall Mall, the mass-circulation monthlies. After the modernist consolidation of the 1920s, those venues became, for the anthologists of the next two generations, a mark against rather than a mark for. The short story as Aumonier practiced it, tight O. Henry-descended structure, social observation, formal closure, was precisely the mode modernism was defined against. Byatt and Hensher each include a single Aumonier story in their anthologies, but “The Octave of Jealousy” is in neither; it remains outside the current teaching rotation.
The pattern deserves isolating because quality has nothing to do with it. Aumonier’s form is the form most broadly taught today in creative-writing workshops. The anthologies punish him for being popular in his own time.
Why it still matters. “The Octave of Jealousy” is an eight-part ring composition: a tramp envies a workman, the workman envies a clerk, the clerk envies a merchant, upward through eight social tiers to a prince who closes the ring by envying the tramp. It is technically a small miracle, closer to Maupassant’s “La Parure” than anything English literature produced between the wars.
Sources. John Galsworthy, Foreword to The Collected Stories of Stacy Aumonier (Hutchinson, 1928). Good Housekeeping (UK), March 1939. Alexander McCall Smith, Introduction to Turnpike Books edition of Miss Bracegirdle and Others (2013). Times Literary Supplement obituary, 28 December 1928.
At publication. West was eighteen when “The Typewriter” shared second prize with Zora Neale Hurston’s “Muttsy” in the 1926 Opportunity literary contest. The judges included Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson. Edward J. O’Brien selected it for The Best Short Stories of 1926 (Dodd, Mead), placing West in a table of contents that also carried Hemingway: the highest mainstream validation any Harlem Renaissance short story by a teenager received that decade.
The forgetting. West’s career arc is the Harlem Renaissance’s counter-history. She outlived nearly all the major figures, dying in 1998, and published her second novel The Wedding in 1995, at eighty-seven. But the middle decades buried her. Her fiction treated the Black middle class of Boston rather than the primitivist Harlem that the white patronage economy rewarded in the 1920s; by the time of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, her subject, Black bourgeois interiority, was again judged insufficiently political. Cheryl A. Wall’s Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana UP, 1995) and Lawrence Jackson’s The Indignant Generation (Princeton UP, 2011) trace the double disqualification in detail. The result is that the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, third edition, represents West only by an excerpt from her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, and by none of her short fiction. “The Typewriter” itself was not collected in a book until Verner Mitchell’s The Richer, the Poorer (1995) and later The Last Leaf of Harlem (2008), both largely out of print.
Why it still matters. A Black janitor, dictating to his young daughter’s typing drills, invents the persona of a stockbroker named J. Lucius Jones; over seven pages the persona becomes a necessity, and its failure becomes the story’s ending. The structure is Joycean; the diagnosis of aspirational masculinity is Ellisonian two decades before Invisible Man.
Sources. Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis, Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle (Rutgers UP, 2012). Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana UP, 1995). Lawrence Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton UP, 2011). Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, July 1926.
10. “The Happiest Man on Earth” by Albert Maltz (1938)
Mechanism: political repudiation · anthology petrifaction
Where to read it.Harper’s Magazine archive, June 1938: https://harpers.org/archive/1938/06/the-happiest-man-on-earth/. Access requires a Harper’s subscription; this is the one story on this list that cannot currently be read free, a fact that belongs to its case.
At publication. Maltz’s story appeared in Harper’s for June 1938 and won the O. Henry Memorial Award first prize that year. Its plot is minimal: an unemployed man walks into the office of his brother-in-law, a dispatcher, and begs for a job driving nitroglycerin trucks, work whose fatality rates are understood by both men. Critics read it immediately as the signature short fiction of the Depression’s late phase, and the story was reprinted through the 1940s as a standard example of compressed American realism.
The forgetting. Maltz was one of the Hollywood Ten. In 1947 he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee; in 1950 he went to federal prison; from 1948 until approximately 1970 his name appeared on no American screen credit. Alan Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time (UNC Press, 2002) and Trinity of Passion (UNC Press, 2007) document the precise mechanism by which McCarthy-era blacklists were extended from film into publishing and pedagogy: anthologies in preparation during 1948–1954 dropped Maltz’s stories without comment, and editors assembling later editions consulted the newer tables of contents rather than the older ones. A secondary mechanism compounded the primary. Maltz’s 1946 New Masses essay “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” had produced an intra-Communist backlash that damaged his standing on the literary left as well, leaving him without partisans in either camp. The O. Henry Prize-winning story of 1938 has not been included in a major American literature anthology in the current editions of the Norton, Heath, or Library of America series.
Why it still matters. The story is five thousand words long, technically conservative, and morally exact. It is what the American Depression short story looked like when written by someone whose commitments would later become disqualifying. It should be taught beside Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums” and Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; it is not.
Sources. Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (UNC Press, 2002). Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (UNC Press, 2007). Victor Navasky, Naming Names (1980). The O. Henry Prize Stories, 1938, ed. Harry Hansen (Doubleday, Doran).
Patterns of Forgetting
Throughout our research, the Longhand Almanac team discovered six recurring patterns when it came to forgetting works of short fiction.
The first is the anthology bottleneck (anthology_bottleneck). When an editor selects one story to represent an author, later editors copy the selection, and the rest of the corpus is lost. Morrison survives in English anthologies as “Behind the Shade” because Byatt chose it and Hensher repeated the choice; “Lizerunt,” the more ambitious work, has nowhere to land. The same effect operates on Aumonier, on Freeman, on Coppard. The mechanism is editorial path-dependence rather than aesthetic judgment, and it is one of the most consequential forces in the short-story canon.
The second is premature death without a literary estate (premature_death_without_estate). Crackanthorpe drowned at twenty-six; Richard Middleton took his life at twenty-nine; Aumonier died of tuberculosis at fifty-one. A writer’s reputation in the decades after death depends on whether someone, a widow, an editor, an academic, carries the archive forward. When no one does, the work falls out of reprint rotation within a generation and out of memory within two.
The third is venue contamination (venue_contamination). Grimké’s “The Closing Door” was published in a birth-control magazine and was therefore surveyed by reproductive-politics historians rather than literary anthologists. Maltz was associated with New Masses and the Hollywood Ten. The venue’s politics became, after the fact, a reason to leave the work out of teaching rotations that considered themselves apolitical.
The fourth is superseded translation (superseded_translation). Schnitzler’s Leutnant Gustl entered English in 1926 through Richard L. Simon’s translation and left circulation in the 1970s when Penguin shifted to later renderings. Machado de Assis, Babel, and Lu Xun show the same pattern: the first English translation becomes unavailable once a second, better translation appears, and the specific stories chosen by the first translator drop out of the corpus the second translator consolidates.
The fifth is displacement by a close competitor (displacement_by_close_competitor). Phelps loses the industrial-fiction slot to Davis. Cooke loses the New England slot to Freeman and Jewett. Spofford loses the gothic slot to writers unborn when she was publishing. The canon has slots; each slot holds few writers; the winners are not always the best.
The sixth is political repudiation, formal and informal (political_repudiation). Maltz was blacklisted. Schnitzler’s books were burned. Grimké’s subject matter exceeded what her available periodicals could carry. The politics of a writer’s moment become the silence of the next moment.
What emerges from the ten cases, read together, is that canon formation is less a judgment than a sequence of administrative acts: an editor’s selection, a publisher’s reprint cycle, a translator’s contract, an anthologist’s deadline. What dropped these writers was logistics.
The Mechanism Vocabulary
Each entry above carries its tags from the almanac’s working vocabulary of thirteen mechanisms of forgetting. The nine at work in this list:
anthology bottleneck anthology_bottleneck
One selection comes to stand in for an author, and later editors copy it; the rest of the corpus stops being reprinted.
anthology petrifaction anthology_petrifaction
Anthology slots assigned decades ago freeze in place across reissues, and the table of contents outlives the judgment behind it.
displacement by a close competitor displacement_by_close_competitor
A neighbor with a longer life, a sharper device, or a better champion takes the slot a writer might have held.
political repudiation political_repudiation
Blacklist, denunciation, or a disqualifying association; editors drop the name, and the next generation never reads it.
one-story tax one_story_tax
The canon grants an author one representative work and discards the rest of the shelf.
venue contamination venue_contamination
The venue’s name becomes baggage, and the work it published stops being surveyed by the fields that would have kept it.
venue collapse venue_collapse
The magazine or platform dies and takes its contents out of circulation with it.
premature death without estate premature_death_without_estate
The writer dies young, and no widow, executor, or academic carries the archive into the next generation.
superseded translation superseded_translation
A newer translation displaces an older one, and the stories the first translator chose drop out of the corpus.
The Case for Active Recovery
The argument for recovery does not rank these ten above the stories we teach. Some are better, some are not; a working canon should contain both. The argument is that the mechanisms by which these stories left circulation are mechanisms we can now see, and that seeing them creates a responsibility. A canon assembled by accident is a backlog.
Nine of the ten stories in this document exist free, in a form a reader can open tonight, and the tenth sits one subscription away. Spofford is on the Internet Archive. Schnitzler’s 1926 translation is on the Internet Archive. Grimké is on HathiTrust. The barriers to reading them are no longer material. What has been missing is the act of pointing, and the willingness to treat pointing as serious work.
The platforms that shape contemporary reading are the anthologies of our moment. They inherit the selections of the twentieth-century anthologists and reproduce their gaps automatically, because automation is the condition of scale. A literary culture that wishes to know what it contains must therefore do deliberately what the twentieth century did by default: read widely, choose openly, and keep the choices visible.
A canon is a set of agreements. It is always available for revision by whoever will read.
Bibliography
1. Spofford, “Circumstance.” Alfred Bendixen, Introduction to “The Amber Gods” and Other Stories (Rutgers UP, 1989). Emily Dickinson, Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Harvard UP, 1958), L261. Elizabeth K. Halbeisen, Harriet Prescott Spofford: A Romantic Survival (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935). William Dean Howells, ed., The Great Modern American Stories (Boni and Liveright, 1920). Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers (Knopf, 2009).
2. Phelps, “The Tenth of January.” Carol Farley Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Twayne, 1982). Elizabeth Duquette and Cheryl Tevlin, eds., Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Susan S. Williams, Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Jean Fagan Yellin, “The Tenth of January: Fiction and Fact,” New England Quarterly 45 (1972).
3. Cooke, “Mrs. Flint’s Married Experience.” Elizabeth Ammons, Introduction to “How Celia Changed Her Mind” and Selected Stories of Rose Terry Cooke (Rutgers UP, 1986). Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place (University of Illinois Press, 2003). William Dean Howells, Heroines of Fiction, vol. II (Harper & Brothers, 1901).
4. Morrison, “Lizerunt.” John Greenfield, “Arthur Morrison,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP, online edition). P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). Stan Newens, Arthur Morrison (Alderton Press, 2008). Arthur Waugh, The Critic, May 1895.
5. Crackanthorpe, “A Dead Woman.” Jad Adams, Hubert Crackanthorpe: Life and Writings, 1890s.ca. David Crackanthorpe, Hubert Crackanthorpe and English Realism in the 1890s (University of Missouri Press, 1977). William Greenslade, “Naturalism and Decadence: The Case of Hubert Crackanthorpe,” in Decadent Poetics, ed. Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (Palgrave, 2013). Henry James, “Appreciation,” preface to Last Studies (Heinemann, 1897). David Malcolm, ed., Hubert Crackanthorpe, Wreckage: Seven Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2020). William Greenslade and Emanuela Ettorre, eds., Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings (MHRA, 2020).
6. Schnitzler, “Lieutenant Gustl.” Frederick J. Beharriell, “Schnitzler’s Anticipation of Freud’s Dream Theory,” Monatshefte 45 (1953). Konstanze Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler (Reclam, 2005). Henry Hatfield, Modern German Literature (Edward Arnold, 1966). Austrian Academy of Sciences, Schnitzler press-clippings archive, schnitzler-zeitungen.acdh.oeaw.ac.at.
7. Grimké, “The Closing Door.” Carolivia Herron, ed., Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké (Oxford UP, 1991). Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana UP, 1987). Marcy Knopf, ed., The Sleeper Wakes (Rutgers UP, 1993). Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching (University of Illinois Press, 2011).
8. Aumonier, “The Octave of Jealousy.” John Galsworthy, Foreword to The Collected Stories of Stacy Aumonier (Hutchinson, 1928). Good Housekeeping (UK), March 1939. Alexander McCall Smith, Introduction to Miss Bracegirdle and Others, Turnpike Books edition (2013). Times Literary Supplement, 28 December 1928.
9. West, “The Typewriter.” Lawrence Jackson, The Indignant Generation (Princeton UP, 2011). Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis, Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle (Rutgers UP, 2012). Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, July 1926. Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana UP, 1995).
10. Maltz, “The Happiest Man on Earth.” Victor Navasky, Naming Names (Viking, 1980). The O. Henry Prize Stories, 1938, ed. Harry Hansen (Doubleday, Doran, 1938). Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time (UNC Press, 2002). Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion (UNC Press, 2007).
Researcher’s Note
Three verification limits should be acknowledged, along with what was re-checked before publication.
The full tables of contents for all recent American-literature teaching anthologies were spot-checked rather than exhaustively retrieved; readers should consult the current editions directly for the specific stories we claim are absent. Two absences were confirmed against listed tables of contents in September 2026: the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, third edition, carries four Grimké poems and none of her fiction, and Morrison appears in both Byatt’s Oxford and Hensher’s Penguin anthologies only as “Behind the Shade.” Where canon absence is marginal, Spofford in particular has moved in and out of Norton editions, we have said so in the entry itself rather than treating the question as settled.
Every URL in this document was opened and read in September 2026, with one exception: the HathiTrust Birth Control Review volume refuses automated access and was opened by hand before publication. The Harper’s link is live but subscription-gated, as entry 10 discloses. Corrections applied at re-verification: Aumonier’s age at death (fifty-one), Dorothy West’s age at the publication of The Wedding (eighty-seven), a hedged range for the Pemberton Mill dead (88 to 145), the editors of the 2014 Phelps selected edition (Elizabeth Duquette and Cheryl Tevlin), and the removal of one erroneous reprint citation for “Circumstance.”
One verification limit is inherited from the research file: a period New York Evening Post review of Goldberg’s 1921 Brazilian Tales, relevant to a planned companion list on stories in translation, is attested only through a clipping described in a bookseller listing; we did not handle the physical copy.