This book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation which studies the shift of emphasis from plot to character in the American short fiction early in the 20th century. The author contends that this shift can be attributed to a set of discursive and intertextual determinations, and particularly, to the changes in the dominant ideologies of institutions of professional/academic readers. In the early 1900s the emergence of a middle-class reading public, the wide demand for good entertainment, and the premature state of short story criticism conditioned the dominance of the plot-oriented mode and its popularity, which reaches its zenith in the success of O. Henry short stories. Before the second decade was over, however, O. Henry came to be attacked in a crusade led by a few prominent editors and critics and by 1945 O. Henry as a literary villain had become a commonplace in the dominant discourse of short story criticism. His fall paralleled, chronologically, the rise and gradual institutionalization of the New Criticism and the canonization of a new generation of writers and a new mode of writing in the American short fiction.