After a brief but active career in the Ottoman military, Ömer Seyfettin (1884-1920) spent the remainder of his short life as a literature teacher at Istanbul’s esteemed Kabataş Mekteb-i Sultanisi. A prominent figure in Turkey’s “National Literature” movement, he lambasted the imitative Westernization of many of his contemporaries even while championing a Turkish shorn of Arabic and Persian constructions. His oeuvre included works of theatre and poetry; however, he is known first and foremost as a founding father of the short story tradition in modern Turkish.