Short stories stretch back to centuries ago, when works like the "Arabian Nights" or Boccaccio's "Decameron" and even the Bible put the short narrative form to entertaining use. While it is hard to pin down one story, or one author, or one cultural tradition from which the modern short story arose, some have narrowed it down to a single story of Walter Scott's in 1827. Ensuing short stories took off in numerous countries ever since, notably in the U.S. with Melville and Hawthorne. The event-plot type of story, although used frequently in modern stories, hails back to the earliest days of short stories when structure, plot and direction in the story were key elements in driving the story forward. Up until the turn of the 20th century this type of story predominated the short story scene.
With the entree of Anton Chekhov's short story contributions in the late 1800s, a departure from what was usually a formulaic beginning-middle-end story structure came to the foreground. In Chekhov's stories, you now had the random, unaccountable and absurd, unvarnished by author judgment, or pat conclusions or climaxes. In this way his stories were life-like and almost painfully so. Short story writers of the 20th century such as James Joyce and Raymond Carver up until the present owe a heavy debt to Chekhov for the way he revolutionized the short story. His could be seen as one of the major early shifts in modern short stories.
Another key turning point in modern short stories was the style used by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, which was at once obscure and yet clear, puzzling and straightforward. This modernist style is exemplified in his collection of stories "In Our Time," published in 1925.
Perhaps the first clear break away from the Chekhovian model came in the mid-20th century with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino, who began using a cryptic or suppressed style of story, although Rudyard Kipling made use of the suppressed narrative in the early 1900s. The suppressed narrative contains an underlying meaning behind the text itself that the reader must unravel.
Neither specifically modern nor traditional, the mini-novel story does what a regular event-plot-driven novel would do, but within a shorter span of pages. Charles Dickens, Chekhov and myriad other short story writers have used this technique.
Seen as a decided departure from Chekhov, the poetic story is a rarer kind of story that takes on aspects of lyric poetry within the confines of a short story. Exemplars of this type of story include DH Lawrence, Dylan Thomas an JG Ballard. The latter's work stretches from the 1950s to the recent times offering a haunting voyage into inner space that can be difficult to pin down.
A newer development in the contemporary short story scene, is the biographical story, which emerged in the 1990s with short stories that co-opted elements of nonfiction such as footnotes, font changes and statistics, to meld fact and fiction in an increasingly media-saturated hyper-environment. Authors including Dave Eggers and William Vollman have used this venue to present real people into fiction or write fictionally about real lives. This change from the Chekhovian lineup, if not handled well, could turn whimsical.