The Lady or the Tiger? Essay - Critical Essays  Critical
Overview  Shortly after Stockton published "The Lady, or the
Tiger?,'' he and his wife left on an extended European vacation.
Thus, he missed much of the initial debate that swirled around
his story. Martin Griffin in his 1939 biography of Stockton said
that "notices of the strange dilemma proposed by the story began
to appear in newspapers and critical reviews." The poet Robert
Browning believed the man chose the door with the tiger, and
Griffin suggested that Stockton weighted the story towards that
conclusion. Many other readers, famous and not-so-famous,
debated the ending in various public and literary forums. The
controversy was so vibrant that when Stockton returned to the
United States he was deluged with letters. In response to the
story's popularity, he wrote a similar story with a trick ending
called "The Discourager of Hesitancy." In another story, "His
Wife's Deceased Sister," Stockton tells the story of a writer
who writes a wildly popular