Of all the great lost arts of America, perhaps it’s time to praise the short story.

People still write them and magazines and literary journals still publish them. But we must have hit some sort of a peak – a harmonic convergence, perhaps – in the middle of the last century. In a long tradition that included Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ring Lardner and Ernest Hemingway, came two great mid-20th Century masters whose private lives have just been put on display.

Flannery O’Connor is the subject of Brad Gooch’s Flannery (Little, Brown, $30) and John Cheever gets the epic treatment in Cheever by Blake Bailey (Knopf, $35).

O’Connor (at right) and Cheever are among the greatest storytellers in our history. Happens that they are both favorites of mine. When I was a young swain, working on a magazine, my managing editor introduced me to O’Connor’s work. My mentor was no slouch himself – a gifted author of short stories, winner of the prestigious O. Henry Award – and so I gorged on his advice, swallowing whole O’Connor’sComplete Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $17).

Her stories, often called Southern Grotesque, formed whole worlds. Lesser writers might try to fashion a novel from the material O'Connor used for mere paragraphs. Each story offered new, dark insight to the soul of a Southern eccentric. Odd and twisted, her stories are unforgettable.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" was about a family car trip derailed by an escaped killer. "Good Country People" featured a charlatan who steals an introverted woman's wooden leg. "The Lame Shall Enter First" used a familiar O'Connor them, the well-intentioned helping the less-fortunate, and struck a resounding chord in a symphony of human nature.

This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2009.