This handbook aims to provide students, teachers, and other readers with a concise survey of the American short story from its early beginnings to the first decade of the 21st century. At the same time, it critically reflects the many intricacies and problems involved in the writing of literary history and canon formation. In contrast to the many introductions to the American short story that focus primarily on individual authors, the order of contributions is based roughly on the diachronic sequence of what can be considered as the major eras of the genre, with the emphasis on the dominant thematic and formal developments of the time. The chapters offer a series of introductions to the major (sub-)genres as well as model interpretations of stories that serve as paradigm examples of these (sub-)genres. They thus present a broad overview of key periods, genres, and writers as well as in-depth analyses of selected stories. Moreover, both the volume as a whole and the individual chapters attempt to provide students with a large collection of texts, topics, and analytical techniques that can be adopted and expanded in the process of exam preparation. The authors discussed in this volume include such ‘classic’ short story writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and Eudora Welty as well as contemporary authors such as Bharati Mukherjee, Simon Ortiz, Nicole Krauss, and many others.