European fairy stories do not usually feature fairies. They might not even include fantastical creatures such as giants, goblins, elves, and talking animals. Both folktales, and fairy stories are rooted in an oral tradition that has thousands of years of history. Both genres feature interplay between the structure of the tale and the execution (or telling) of the story. But we can recognize a fairy story as a fairy story because of its fantastical elements.

“The Golden Bird” (The Brother’s Grimm) begins:

A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree, which bore golden apples. These apples were always counted, and about the time when they began to grow ripe it was found that every night one of them was gone.

From this germ of the fantastic — _every night _one of them was gone — anything is possible in narrative as long as the narrative follows certain rules. At the same time the story unfolds, it is being told or performed. The structure of these rules are familiar to any reader of the fairly tale: the rules of three, beauty is good, ugliness is bad, beauty can be ugly, and ugliness can be beauty, and so on. Generally, however, these rules also follow certain patterns and affirm an existing social order in which kings rule and look after their people, and the people look after their kings.

American fairy tales, conversely, developed in a land that was self-conscious of its relation to European culture, a land uninhabited by kings, queens, and elves; America is a land with a completely different social order. However, fantastic stories began to be written in the United States that reflected the New World. Where European fairy tales were closely aligned with folktalkes, American fairy tales were more literary, deliberately constructed as written material even if the authors were familiar with tall tales and American folktale forms. Most readers are familiar with Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. But there are also self-consciously American fairy tales by writers such as Frank Baum, who published a book titled simply, American Folk Tales, and of course wrote, The Wizard of Oz.

Just as European fairy stories balance interplay between the structure of the tale and telling of the story, American fairy tales balance these two aspects of a story.

“The Potato Face Blind Man Who Lost the Diamond Rabbit on His Gold Accordion” (Carl Sandburg) begins:

There was a Potato Face Blind Man used to play an accordion on the Main Street corner nearest the post office in the Village of Liver-and-Onions. Any Ice Today came along and said, “It looks like used to be an 18 carat gold accordion with rich pawnshop diamonds in it; it looks like it used to be a grand accordion once and not so grand now.”

European fairy stories provide access to the continent’s cultural past. The New World colonized by Europeans was empty of an accessible past. In America, the fairy stories reflected the fantastic reality of the new continent.

Here is a short list of American Fairy Tales:

A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss
American Fairy Tales by L. Frank Baum
American Fairy Tales: From Rip Van Winkle to the Rootabaga Stories by Neil Philip
Further Fables For Our Time by James Thurber
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg
Snow White by Donald Barthelme
The Girl With Brown Fur by Stacey Levine
The Sketch Book by Washington Irving

What are some others?