In this survey of African American short fiction, we will trace the evolution of the form from the 1890s to the present. We will begin with stories by writers such as Charles Chesnutt and Anna Julia Cooper, exploring their reliance upon and revision of folk sources and the conventions of local color and plantation literature. From there, we will turn to the short fiction of the Harlem Renaissance and mid-twentieth century by writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin to examine its engagement with modernist practices. We will end our investigation with with a consideration of stories by writers such as Charles Johnson, Andrea Lee and Junot Diaz that enact postmodernist practices of representation. In this literary trajectory, these short stories ask us to rethink the relationship between form and content. They open up new avenues for envisioning black identity as it intersects with gender, sexuality and class; new conceptions of community and new ways of narrating individual and collective histories. As we read, we will delineate the intertwined aesthetic and political aspects of this economical form. We will ask how the form’s transformations both reflect and act upon the changing literary marketplace.