One of the earliest short stories in the United States was Charles Brockden Brown’s Somnambulism. Washington Irving wrote mysterious tales, including Rip van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). Nathaniel Hawthorne published the first part of his Twice-Told Tales in 1837. Edgar Allan Poe wrote his tales of mystery and imagination between 1832 and 1849. Classic stories are ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, and the first detective story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’.

In Germany, the first collection of short stories was by Heinrich von Kleist in 1810 and 1811. The Brothers Grimm published their first volume of collected fairy tales in 1812. E. T. A. Hoffmann followed with his own original fantasy tales, of which The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) are the most famous.

In the later 19th century, the growth of print magazines and journals created a strong demand for short fiction. With rapid industrialisation, people got less time to read long pieces of literature. They expected to read something interesting in a short period, and in a single sitting. This demand was fulfilled by the short story and soon it became a popular genre. In the United Kingdom, Thomas Hardy wrote dozens of short stories, including ‘The Three Strangers’ (1883), ‘A Mere Interlude’ (1885) and ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’ (1890). Rudyard Kipling published the short story collections, such as Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) for grown-ups as well as The Jungle Book (1894) for children. In 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle brought the detective story to a new height with The Adventures of Sherlock Homes. H. G. Wells wrote his first science fiction stories in the 1880s, while Herman Melville published his story collection, The Piazza Tales, in 1856.

The most prolific French author of short stories was Guy de Maupassant. In Russia, Ivan Turgenev gained recognition with his story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches. Nikolai Leskov created his first short stories in the 1860s. In the United Kingdom, periodicals, such as The Strand Magazine, The Sketch, Harper’s Magazine and Story-Teller contributed to the popularity of the short story. Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), also known by the pen name, Saki, wrote satirical short stories about Edwardian England. In Ireland, James Joyce published his short story collection, Dubliners in 1914.

The period following World War II saw a great flowering of literary short fiction in the United States. The New Yorker continued to publish the works of the form’s leading mid-century practitioners, including Shirley Jackson, whose story, ‘The Lottery’ published in 1948, had elicited the strongest response in the magazine’s history at the time.

The first years of the 21st century saw the emergence of a new generation of young writers, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Uma Parameswaran, Farida Karodia, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Karen Russell, Nathan Englander, Kevin Brockmeier, George Saunders, German-American bilingual writer, Paul-Henri Campbell, and Dan Chaon. Blogs and e-zones joined traditional paper-based literary journals to showcase the work of emerging authors.

Thus, the development of the short story is distinctive. Its growth suggests the popularity of this genre. The most important elements of the short story are plot, characters, narrative perspective (point of view) and setting. In ancient India, it was believed that listening or narrating a story grants merit to the one who narrates it as well as to the one who listens to it. Stories were held in high esteem as an inexhaustible source of teaching and delight, a fit medium to inculcate values. The tradition was carried on by common people who relied on the treasure found in great Indian epics, as well as folk narratives. Ancient Indian epics, such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are not based on a single plot; they are a series of stories related to the central plot.

The first written collection of stories from India is the Panchtantra. It is also the first Indian book to be translated into many western languages. Another famous literary collection of Indian folk tales is in Sanskrit, called Kathasaritsagara, which means ocean or sea of stories, by Somdeva written around 1070. Folk Tales of India by Ramanujan—a collection of oral tales from 22 languages—comprises stories written originally in Tulu, a Dravidian language.

Hindi writers, such as Munshi Prem Chand, Jaya Shankar Prasad, Rabindranath Tagore, Acharya Chatursen, Janandra Kumar, Yash Pal and many more contributed to the genre. Story telling is a skill that comes quite naturally to human beings, particularly Indians, because of their being fed on grandmother’s tales since their infancy and also because of their ancient, rich and continuing traditions. The Indian English short story can be traced back to the Brihatkatha Saritsagara of Gunadhya and the Jataka Tales of Buddha. Starting with S.C. Dutt’s Realities of Indian Life (1885), the tribe of short story writers has continued to increase and allure readers.