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Its History. The idea of the short story is a decidedly modern conception. It was in thefirst half of the last century that Edgar Allan Poe worked out the idea that the short storyshould create a single effect. In his story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," for example,the single effect is a feeling of horror. In the first sentence of the story he begins to createthis effect by words that suggest to the reader's imagination gloom and foreboding. Thishe consciously carries out just as an artist creates the picture of his dreams with manyskillful strokes of his brush. Poe gave attention also to compressing all the details of theplot of the story instead of expanding them as in a long story or novel. He believed, too,that the plot should be original or else worked out in some new way. The single incidentgiven, moreover, should reveal to the imagination of the reader the entire life of the chiefcharacter. Almost at the same time, Nathaniel Hawthorne, with a less conscious effort tocreate a single effect, based his tales upon the same ideas, with a tendency towardsromance.In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Guy de Maupassant, a French author withoutacquaintance with the work of the American writers, conceived the same idea of the shortstory, adding to it the quality of dramatic effect; that is, the idea that the single mainincident should appeal to the imagination of the reader just as if it were a little playpresented to him.Bret Harte followed in this country with short stories that brought out, less precisely, thesame idea of the short story, with the addition of local color, the atmosphere of California