Short stories
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Best American Humorous Short Stories, by Various
Project Gutenberg's The Best American Humorous Short Stories, by Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The Best American Humorous Short Stories Author: Various Release Date: February 5, 2004 [EBook #10947] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN HUMOR *** Produced by Keith M. Eckrich and PG Distributed Proofreaders THE BEST AMERICAN HUMOROUS SHORT STORIES
Best American Humorous Short Stories, by Various
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Edited by ALEXANDER JESSUP, Editor of "Representative American Short Stories," "The Book of the Short Story," the "Little French Masterpieces" Series, etc. INTRODUCTION This volume does not aim to contain all "the best American humorous short stories"; there are many other stories equally as good, I suppose, in much the same vein, scattered through the range of American literature. I have tried to keep a certain unity of aim and impression in selecting these stories. In the first place I determined that the pieces of brief fiction which I included must first of all be not merely good stories, but good short stories. I put myself in the position of one who was about to select the best short stories in the whole range of American literature,[1] but who, just before he started to do this, was notified that he must refrain from selecting any of the best American short stories that did not contain the element of humor to a marked degree. But I have kept in mind the wide boundaries of the term humor, and also the fact that the humorous standard should be kept second--although a close second--to the short story standard. In view of the necessary limitations as to the