Maupassant and the American Short Story

Americans at the end of the nineteenth century met Guy de Maupassant largely through translation, and the tales chosen by Jonathan Sturges and others were mostly surprise-inversion stories. Richard Fusco argues that this skewed sample produced a misreading with long consequences. Ambrose Bierce and O. Henry took the twist for Maupassant's whole method, and later writers filed both men under the trick ending. Kate Chopin and Henry James, who read him in French, saw a far subtler craftsman.

Alongside this literary history, Fusco adapts Aristotelian concepts to propose seven structural formulas for the short story, among them the linear, the ironic coda, the loop and the sinusoidal, and shows Maupassant at work in every one. It is a clear, scholarly study for students of the short story and anyone curious about how literary form changes as it crosses from one language to another.