Death of the short story

Oliver has a theory for everything and Pete cannot help himself listening to Oliver's stories.

Pete: Whatever happened to short stories?

Oliver: Short stories. O. Henry. George O. and so on?

Pete: Yes. The genre seemed to die out after the fifties.

Oliver: I’ll tell you. And it’s a very interesting story.

Now there was once a writer who was quite famous. He traveled widely, wrote well and won prizes. One day, a man from a government agency asked this writer, "Go to this island, and send back reports. We'll pay for your fishing trips." So the writer goes to the island and makes friends with the leader there and his politics change. He writes a short story about a man and a fish. The agency who pay him think the story is subversive because it is sympathetic to the island, so when the writer returns to his own country, a hired gun shoots the writer and the agency sends out reports to make it look like suicide.

Pete: And then the writer became even more famous?

Oliver: To begin with. But the agency saw how popular short stories were so they put heaps of money into the movie industry, and into spy films in particular, which resulted in people reading less, in particular short stories, and going to the movies more. That's why the short story genre reached its peak in the 1950s and waned after that. And the agency realized they could change culture as well as military events so they set up another agency which they called an information service. But that's another story.