Critic Henry Vedder wrote in his 1895 book, American Fiction To-Day, about how the story became a social fad and commended Stockton on his commercial shrewdness and his skill as a writer of short fiction. As tastes changed in the twentieth century and modernism exerted its hold over literature, stories like Stockton's became antiquated and were considered relics of an earlier, less relevant time. Stockton had worried about this all along, yet the...