HUCKLEBERRY by FRANK STOCKTON A TALE OF RIDDLES

1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales

Jon Hagadorn

Fiction, Arts

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Frank Stockton not only gave us some great short stories but also some very well-loved children's tales.

Frank Stockton (1854 - 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known for his allegorical fairy tales for all ages. Rather than moralizing, he tended to poke fun at qualities like greed, violence, and abuse of power. The Lady, or the Tiger?, his most famous story (published in 1882), offers a compelling choice for the reader because there is no right answer. It is a fascinating illustration of the conflict between determinism and free-will, an increasingly popular choice for middle school language arts teachers to include in their persuasive writing lessons. His story, The Griffin and the Minor Canon (1885) received renewed interest in 1963, with an edition illustrated by Maurice Sendak. We feature both works on our Fairy Tales Guide.

Stockton also offers a different storytelling style, a more subtle element of surprise, as in The Widow's Cruise, a slow-paced conversation between widows and visiting seafaring men, in which one widow tells the most dramatic sea story of all.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales.
0:19.5	This is your host and storyteller, John Haggardorn.
0:25.1	Remembering that we are classic short stories and tales,
0:29.1	we have a tale for you today, actually a fairy tale,
0:32.1	written by one of my favorite authors, Frank Stockton,
0:35.6	who gave us a lot of great stories.
0:40.1	He was also a great writer of fairy tales and very popular in his time. This one's called Huckleberry. If you have anyone near
0:47.7	between the ages of 8 and 12, it's a good time to share. The story is about Old Riddler,
0:53.7	who was a gnome, and Huckleberry, father and
0:57.3	son gnomes who enjoy teaching humans by riddling, but in different ways. Their common lesson,
1:04.4	if a thing gives you pleasure, it's very likely that it will give somebody else pleasure.
1:09.5	And now our story.
1:12.4	More than 168 years ago, there lived a curious personage called Old Riddler.
1:18.8	His real name was unknown to the people in that part of the country where he dwelt,
1:23.0	but this made no difference, for the name given him was probably just as good as his own.
1:28.3	Indeed, I am quite sure that it was better, for it meant something, and very few people have names that mean anything.
1:36.3	He was called Old Riddler, for two reasons.
1:40.3	In the first place, he was an elderly man.
1:43.3	Secondly, he was the greatest fellow to ask riddles that you ever heard of.
1:47.7	So this name fitted him very well.
1:50.9	Old Ridler had some very peculiar characteristics.
1:54.5	Among others, he was a gnome.
	...

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