Short and Sweet

"What their three subjects shared was the good fortune of writing at midcentury, when the institutions of print supported the flourishing of the short story as never before or since. There were mass-circulation magazines and more-exclusive journals that would pay writers for stories that readers would spend money to read. In addition to The New Yorker, there was Esquire and (a bit later) Playboy and a host of publications with 'Review' in the title: Saturday, Partisan, Kenyon, American, Evergreen, some of which still publish. All of them fed a boom in short fiction that may not have been sufficiently appreciated at the time.
"It is easy, perhaps irresistible, to wax nostalgic for those days. But if the golden age of American magazines is long gone, the short story itself has shown remarkable durability, and may even be poised for a resurgence."

A. O. Scott in The New York Times praises the American short story.