the nature of human loss, violence, and devastation. Another famous Urdu writer is Ismat Chughtai, whose short story, "Lihaaf" (The Quilt), on a lesbian relationship between an upper-class Muslim woman and her maidservant created great controversy following its publication in 1942. Notable examples in the period up to World War II include: Bohemia Franz Kafka "A Hunger Artist" (1922) Brazil Mário de Andrade António de Alcantâra Machado Brás, Bexiga e Barra Funda (1928) Graciliano Ramos Carlos Drummond de Andrade England Virginia Woolf "Kew Gardens" (1919) "Solid Objects" W. Somerset Maugham V.S. Pritchett Evelyn Waugh Muriel Spark L.P. Hartley Arthur C. Clarke "Travel by Wire!" (1937) Germany Thomas Mann Hindi Jaishankar Prasad Japan Ryūnosuke Akutagawa New Zealand Katherine Mansfield "The Doll's House" (1922) Portugal Mário de Sá-Carneiro Florbela Espanca Fernando Pessoa United States O. Henry "The Ransom of Red Chief", "The Cop and the Anthem", "The Skylight Room", "After Twenty Years", "The Last Leaf", "A Retrieved Reformation" Ernest Hemingway "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1926) "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927) "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936) William Faulkner Go Down, Moses Dorothy Parker "Big Blonde" (1929) Isaac Asimov "Nightfall" Since 1945 Following World War II, the artistic range and numbers of writers of short stories grew significantly. Due in part to frequent contributions from John O'Hara, The New Yorker would come to exercise substantial influence as a weekly short story publication for more than half a century. Shirley Jackson's story, "The Lottery" (1948), elicited the strongest response in the magazine's history to that time. Other frequent contributors during the 1940s included John Steinbeck, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever, who is best known for "The Swimmer" (1964), beautifully blending realism and surrealism. Many other American short story writers greatly influenced the evolving form of the short story. For example, J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories (1953) experimented with point of view and voice, while Flannery O'Connor's well-known story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1955), reinvigorated the Southern Gothic style. Cultural and social identity played a considerable role in much of the short fiction of the 1960s. Philip Roth and Grace Paley cultivated distinctive Jewish-American voices. Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" (1961) adopted a consciously feminist perspective. James Baldwin's collection, Going to Meet the Man (1965), told stories of African-American life. Science fiction stories with a special poetic touch was a genre developed with great popular success by Ray Bradbury. Stephen King