Beginning as a poet and a critic of poetry, I wrote my dissertation on William Carlos Williams. It was a great way to begin an academic career since Williams himself never stayed in the poetry lane. His novels were the sites of continuous experimentation (The Great American Novel, White Mule). So, too, were his “mixed form” texts: In the American Grain, Spring and All, Paterson, and the late long poems. Throughout his life, Williams was a true innovator of forms.His short stories were the paring down of speech as he heard it; they were instrumental in creating a new American story. In fact, Williams recognized how important what he had done in writing short fiction was. Invited to the University of Washington in the year following the first of his major strokes, he wrote his highly significant essay about the story as a form. Privileging American speech as he customarily did, Williams showed ways of collapsing the scaffolding of traditional fiction so that characters’ language became the heart of a work. He maintains in his 1949 essay “A Beginning on the Short Story” that “the principal feature of the short story is that it is short—and so must pack in what it has to say…. It seems to me a good medium for nailing down a single conviction. Emotionally.”He references Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” and some Poe stories. But rather than discussing them, he jumps ahead with this warning: “You can’t ‘learn’ to write a short story—either from Du Maupassant or Henry James. All you can learn is what Du M. or H. J. did. Every writer must find his or her own form.” He continues, “it isn’t a snippet from the newspaper. It isn’t realism. It is, as in all forms of art, taking the materials of every day and using them to raise the consciousness of our lives to higher aesthetic and moral levels by the use of the art.” Williams spends some time discussing the writer’s mind and his or her imagination. The beginning of a work of fiction is not necessarily unique or even artistic. He says that the short story uses the same materials as newsprint, the same dregs…. What the newspaper uses on the lowest (sentimental) level, the short story had best elevate…. This should make apparent that a mere “thrilling” account of an occurrence from daily life, a transcription of a fact, is not of itself and for that reason a short story. You get the fact, it interests you for whatever reason, of that fact you make, using words, a story. In another segment of the essay, Williams emphasizes the contextual imagination: What sort of a short story must a Gogol have written or a Kipling in India—in their time? And so, practically speaking, what sort of short story must be written in the U.S. or the Northwest today? I use the word must, I don’t ask what you would care to do. Each man or woman is born facing a must. Who will drive it through or even see it? The one who will, will be at least justified and happy in his own eyes doing it…. In other words, to write a short story of parts one must know what he is writing about, see it, smell it—be compelled by it—and be writing what ordinarily one doesn’t want to hear. As Williams moved through his exploration of the short story form, he often used a Hemingway story as illustration: “Two-hearted River” and “Short Happy Life” are both mentioned. So is his apt description of the way Hemingway learned his craft: “Hemingway did at first sit at the feet of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. They taught him a lot. And then he went out and capitalized on it—to at least her disgust, so they say. And she had written at least one magnificent short story. Pound not even one. But then again Hemingway’s not a bad poet and might have been a better one.”This paragraph of William Carlos Williams’s essay gave me my entry to reading Hemingway’s prose, particularly his stories. Starting with Hemingway’s shorter prose forms gave me insight into his craft that had sometimes been derogated as only simple. It was a great—and accurate—insight from Williams, a writer who had himself carved out a niche in the mixed-form pyramids of American modernist writing, from his 1923 Spring and All collection through his 1925 The Great American Novel, into the deceptively fragile stories that perplexed and antagonized so many critics: “The Girl with a Pimply Face,” “A Night in June,” “The Use of Force,” “Jean Beicke,” “Pink and Blue,” “Frankie,” “Verbal Transcription—6 a.m.,” “A Face of Stone,” “Old Doc Rivers,” and many others, filling three volumes of short fiction.As he lectured to the University of Washington students, Williams said, correctly, that “the short story is a wonderful medium for prose experimentation.” The heart of Williams’ understanding of writing the short story, however, was always emotionally based: he honed his art of writing during the Great Depression, when many of his patients were living in a poverty Americans had seldom seen. As he then admitted with his usual candor, I lived among these people. I knew them and saw the essential qualities (not stereotype), the courage, the humor (an accident), the deformity, the basic tragedy of their lives—and the importance of it. You can’t write about something unimportant to yourself. I was involved. That wasn’t all. I saw how they were maligned by their institutions of church and state—and “betters.” I saw how all that was acceptable to the ear about them maligned them. I saw how stereotype falsified them. Nobody was writing about them, anywhere, as they ought to be written about. There was no chance of writing anything acceptable, certainly not salable, about them.It was my duty to raise the level of consciousness, not to say discussion, of them to a higher level, a higher plane. Really to tell…. Until James Laughlin encouraged Williams to publish his stories in collections, they appeared in Leftist magazines and journals: the poor were not good copy for the slick magazines that paid well. Williams aimed to place his fiction in New Masses, American Caravan, New Republic and The Nation. The experimental poet and prose writer had joined the ranks of the Proletariat but he remembered the role the passion of intimate knowledge—the must—had to play for the real writer.I was one of the fortunate academics in the 1960s whose dissertation was published as a book. Wesleyan University Press brought out The Poems of William Carlos Williams and then, in 1970, that press published The Prose of William Carlos Williams. By that time I was so excited about prose that I claimed that Williams’ reputation would eventually be based not on his poems but rather on his stories and novels. That I was wrong only shows how contagious his excitement about the short story (and the novel) was. In another few years, I had learned much more about modernism and had published Hemingway and Faulkner: inventors/masters, drawing obviously from Williams’ placing Hemingway at the feet of Pound and Stein. In that book I began with both writers’ poetry and then moved into their prose, again claiming that the power of their oeuvre stemmed from short forms as they achieved perfection in the writing of them.The 1970s and the 1980s were wonderful decades for explication. Bill Stafford, who then edited the journal Modern Fiction Studies, and Maurice Beebe, who began Contemporary Literature once he had moved away from Purdue University, were hungry for criticism: they wanted to review every academic book that appeared from university presses. They wanted the thorough reading of whatever fiction they found interesting published in their respective journals. Encouraging was a weak word for their responses to writing that came in through the transom. Then George and Barbara Perkins began editing The Journal of Narrative Technique; Bernard Oldsey, College Literature; Jackson Bryer, Tom Inge, and Maurice Duke, Resources for American Literary Study; C. David Mead, The Centennial Review; James Nagel, Studies in American Fiction; Louis Rubin and Kimball King, The Southern Literary Journal; James Phelan, Narrative. There were Studies in Short Fiction and Modernist Studies. There was The Hemingway Review, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, The William Carlos Williams Review. As the study of American literature became rooted in author societies, a number of other publications appeared: Spring (the E. E. Cummings journal), the Djuna Barnes Review, the Philip Roth Review, the Norman Mailer Review, The Kay Boyle Journal, and The Edith Wharton Review.Supporting those separate journal publications was the over-arching annual compilation published by Duke University Press, American Literary Scholarship. Some years I wrote the essay on American Poetry at the turn into the twentieth century; later I wrote the essay on criticism on William Faulkner. Trained as we all had been on Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction and Understanding Poetry, we believed firmly in not only explicating the texts we loved but in keeping track of those explications.It was a time of making use of new printing and more accurate publishing techniques. It was also a time of building university and community library resources. Many universities were moving from a focus on undergraduate education to offering graduate programs: such change demanded more and more library resources. There were the St. James Press volumes that kept track of biography as well as criticism (The St. James Press Reference Guide to Short Fiction, as well as to Poetry). There were the Facts on File Reference Guides to Short Fiction as well as other categories. There was Benet’s Readers’ Encyclopedia of American Literature. There was The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, The International Encyclopedia of Sexual Representation, The Readers’ Encyclopedia of American History. It was a period of processing information that had not existed previously or had not existed in such efficient form. Some of us, trained to become critics, instead opted to become bibliographers.Part of the appeal of that kind of sleuthing lay in the new technology of computers, with their amazing memory. Remember, scholars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s still wrote on typewriters, complete with the use of White-Out for corrections and sheets of carbon paper for making copies. (There was a different kind of White-Out to be used on the carbon copy.) Achieving a fair copy that could be sent to a prestigious journal editor was an irritating and painstaking task. Enclosing the required stamped self-addressed return envelope, should the submission not be accepted, was another debilitating stage in the process. With the computer, saving the submission was easy and safe. Decades later, when the internet changed our process of submission from using the postal service to clicking on “Send,” we barely remembered those early years of laborious typing.The mechanics were changing but those of us who revered Brooks and Warren still believed in the power of explication. Though it may sound sentimental to write this in 2021, we believed in the architecture of formalism, and we also believed it was our duty to share whatever insights we had as readers. Despite the new approaches to “reading literature” that were bombarding the American academy during the 1980s and 1990s, a number of us stayed true to “close reading” and its operating tool, explication. There had always existed a hint of the biographical in this methodology because if the critic had knowledge about an author’s psychology, or about his or her emotional state at the time of writing, we explicators often believed we could read a text more accurately. Hemingway’s physical wounding during World War I became an important component of readings of his war fiction; Melville’s sorrow over the death of his son underlay many of our explications of “Billy Budd”; Sylvia Plath’s anger at various men who professed to love her shaped our readings of not only her poem “Daddy” but also of The Bell Jar. This is not the place to discuss the flood of literary biography that has become fashionable during the twenty-first century, but many of us literary critics have repeatedly succumbed to writing it.Another element in the pervasiveness and thoroughness of explicating texts was the accessibility of manuscript collections and correspondence in archives throughout the United States and England. Some libraries had long held important archives: Yale University’s Beinecke Library was already a storehouse of American modernist treasures. So was the Alderman Library at The University of Virginia, the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, the Lockwood Library at Buffalo, an archive especially wealthy in manuscripts for American poems. The California campuses had long been collecting, and then The University of Texas at Austin developed the Harry Ransom Research Center with its myriad holdings.When the John F. Kennedy Library was finally finished at Harvard, the Hemingway Room and its various archives became a resource for the world of Hemingway scholarship. Then came acquisitions by smaller universities—University of Delaware, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Florida, and so on. A new sub-set of reading a text became thinking through the various versions of an essay, a story, a poem, a novel, not that such investigation was new, but rather that such attention paid to modernist writers was newly relevant.Part of the credibility of explication drew, I think, from this interest in reading all elements of the work as one process. Explication allowed a kind of wholeness, a way of reading from the inside out, a means of understanding why an author made this or that choice. We were hungry for information: we did not believe in separating the author from the work.Primarily, it seems to me, people with the Ph.D. degree in the Humanities during the mid-twentieth century were a comparatively modest group. Though we might aspire to publish essays, and perhaps even a book or two, we understood that we were primarily teachers. And what we were to be instructing our students in learning was the art or the efficiency of writing, perhaps even before instructing them in the art of reading. A less-than-lofty charge, teaching writing and reading, was shrouded in the chalk dust of diagramming sentences on black boards, of marking “Wrong” the simplest true-or-false questions about parts of speech, of making jokes with friends about students’ misreadings of a story like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” (It was the Age of Sputnik, Science degrees were considered superior to Humanities degrees: humanists had become the utility hitters of academic life.)In teaching one of our own favorite stories, however, thoroughly explicating it (to the surprise and even enjoyment of our best students—for every class had those, truly excellent students who gloried in writing and reading well), we learned to perform a close reading of a beloved story. Through attention to sometimes obscure detail, we could help our students learn about the architecture of the short fiction form. We could teach them how crucial a title could be, we could lead them to understand the missing detail, the never-spoken dialogue, the inexplicable rhythm of a lengthy description. We could expand their reading experience.Becoming performative was a result of the large classrooms that literature courses had come to inhabit during the 1960s. When I taught at Wayne State University, the lead Americanists there, Ralph Nash and Vern Wagner, had convinced administrators that large lecture courses did not work. Class sizes were reasonable, students were good, eager. But when I got to Michigan State, with its student body of over 40,000 students, one of my courses in my first year was held in the chemistry building. The room, which had running water at each seat, held 300 students. My department gave me two teaching assistants and a microphone. Though I created a seating chart for taking attendance, and alternated quiz and test formats, discussion was evanescent. Talking about a text, therefore, stayed the teacher’s job.Across campus in the English Department building, undergraduate classrooms held seventy students, rows of seven seats across and ten rows deep. There were no teaching assistants in these classrooms so learning students’ names was another of the teacher’s responsibilities; some discussion, however, was possible. The hook was some compelling question about the work: why this title? why that character? why this descriptor? In the fifty-three years I spent in literature classrooms, no thrill was greater than the explosion of a student’s imagination when he or she found an unexpected key to meaning, when a smile of discovery showed satisfaction, and the student was ready to become his or her own teacher.Since my retirement nearly a decade ago, I have missed teaching, but I have been enjoying writing once again, writing for myself instead of editing dissertations. Even as I began with the Wiley history of American literature from 1950 to the present, I have decided more often than not to write about authors from my beloved modernist and contemporary periods, and one of the books I’ve enjoyed writing the most has been Hemingway’s Wars: The Public and Private Battles. As I sat with files of notes from the Kennedy Hemingway archive, considering possible structures for this assessment of Hemingway’s fiction, I re-read the Finca Vigia edition of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. There it was, the way war (both actual and metaphoric) had perplexed his thinking, his personality, his life choices. Among the stories I found most compelling then was “Landscape with Figures.”Thinking about short stories helped me shape another 2017 book, John Steinbeck, A Literary Life. I had contracted this Steinbeck project earlier but had never come to its actual writing. Then I realized that Steinbeck was never a novelist; he was always, by nature and practice, a story writer. Sometimes that skill was employed in his journalism but even more often in the collections of stories that comprised his novellas (Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday) as well as The Pastures of Heaven, The Long Village, The Red Pony, and The Wayward Bus. It seemed to me then that much of the disappointment over Steinbeck’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature had stemmed from readers’ thinking him inferior to the earlier American novelists who had won that acclaim: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. For all its sophistication, the American short story was never intended to rival the novel.To close, let me mention a few of the essays on American short stories I’d write now, had I energy enough and time. The world of the American short story is even richer in 2021 than it was a century ago.Henry Dumas, “Strike and Fade,” Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry DumasLauren Groff, “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” FloridaHelena Maria Virmontes, “The Cariboo Café,” The MothsElizabeth Spencr, “Owl,” Th Southern WomanWilliam Faulkner, “Hair,” Collected Stories; Knight’s Gambit: Six Mystery StoriesTerry Tempest Williams, “IX,” When Women Were Birds