[Short-piece writers] sit on the edge of Literature.  In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. . . . [Such a writer’s] ears are shut to the ominous rumblings of the dynasties of the world moving toward a cloudier chaos than ever before, but he hears with an acute perception the startling sounds that rabbits make twisting in the bushes along a country road at night . . .  If is difficult for such a person . . . to paint a picture of one’s time.  Your short-piece writer’s time . . . is his own personal time, circumscribed by the short boundaries of his pain and his embarrassment, in which what happens in his digestion, the rear axle of his car, and the confused flow of his relationships with six or eight persons and two or three buildings is of greater importance than what goes on in the nation or in the universe. . . . All that the reader is going to find out is what happened to the writer.  The compensation, I suppose, must lie in the comforting feeling that one has had, after all, a pretty sensible and peaceful life, by comparison.

— James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times