"The art of tearing out the heart of a thing in ten minutes is their national virtue and their national disease. "

The Short Story flourishes in America, probably, for a variety of reasons. One reason, of course, can be found in the singular hurry and variety of American existence, their taste for 'samples' in life, their wasting and tyrannical excitement, which makes their stories as short as their tempers. A Short Story is a short cut to a story: it is the denouement [sic] of a novel without the rest. Just as the Americans require special trains and motor-cars to carry them quickly to their destination, so they require special stories to carry them to the explanation of a dilemma, to enable them, as on some lightning vehicle, to be in at the death of the villain. The art of tearing out the heart of a thing in ten minutes is their national virtue and their national disease. We owe them much gratitude for fostering and ennobling the Short Story, but there is a great deal of danger to literature in the Short Story. It encourages the notion that because we have seen a man hit off in one transfiguring sentence, or one telling and typical act, we know him as we know Tom Jones or Barnes Newcome, whom we know so well that we could tell how they would wipe their boots on a mat.

-April 9, 1901, Daily News