George Pope Morris

Includes The panic of thirty-six; The stage competitors; The gentleman from Cahawba; Stray leaves from a portfolio; Monsieur Flute.

[The Adventure of the Speckled Band]( | Arthur Conan Doyle [Beyond the Bayou]( | Kate Chopin Blue and Green | Virginia Woolf [The Cask of Amontillado]( | Edgar Allan Poe The Cats of Ulthar | H. P. Lovecraft Charon | Lord Dunsany A College Vagabond | Andy Adams The Music of Erich Zann | H. P. Lovecraft A Jug of Sirup | Ambrose Bierce The Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane | Calamity Jane The Little Frenchman and His Water Lots | George Pope Morris The Mermaid | Hans Christian Andersen Miss Brill | Katherine Mansfield The Nightingale | Hans Christian Andersen [An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge]( | Ambrose Bierce The Outcasts of Poker Flat | Bret Harte Romeo and Juliet [Essay] | William Hazlitt Sorrow | Anton Chekhov A Telephonic Conversation | Mark Twain The War Prayer | Mark Twain

The Best American Humorous Short Stories features tales from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and many other well known writers. From the editor: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, 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.