This dissertation examines the aesthetic revival of the short story in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Traditionally, short stories, and the collections that contained them, had been viewed as inferior to the novel. The short story, most often published in the pages of mass-market weeklies such as The Saturday Evening Post, was understood as a primarily commercial genre written for money, not status. The growth of creative writing programs in postwar America offered a new institutional home for literary production, one buffered from the uncertainties of the commercial literary market. Creative writing programs presented favorable circumstances for the short story’s revival. The brevity of the short story made it an ideal genre of fiction for study and composition in writing workshops. Creative writing programs housed literary journals that specialized in short stories, and, since creative writing programs participated in the academy’s economy of prestige in which symbolic, rather than economic, capital is at stake, writers were institutionally rewarded for publishing stories within the journals. By removing the short story from its position as a commercial genre, creative writing programs reframed the value of the short story and emphasized its aesthetic possibilities.
Creative writing programs helped create a renaissance of interest in the short story form that I trace through the examples of four figures: John Cheever, Gordon Lish, Lorrie Moore, and Lee Abbott. Cheever’s omnibus, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), helped reveal the commercial market for short story collections and, with the acclaim the collection provided him, showed that writers could obtain literary recognition by writing in the genre. Gordon Lish’s editing of Raymond Carver’s short stories produced the most popular aesthetic of creative writing programs, literary minimalism. By applying his experimental literary tastes to Carver’s traditionally realist stories, Lish created a new aesthetic for the short story that emphasized sentence-level stylistics rather than details and characterization. Lorrie Moore’s first short story collection, Self-Help (1985), relates a tension found in creative writing workshops between self-expression and disciplined writing to the sense of a self in need of help found in self-help guides. That relation plays out in the pursuit of an aesthetic self—a self in an act of artistic creation—that Moore offers as an ideal mode for living a satisfying life. Lee Abbott serves as representational figure for what it means to be a working writer in the university. While never achieving commercial success, Abbott has found acclaim within creative writing programs, and his career reflects the possibilities available to academic writers.