Although little-known now, in the late nineteenth century Henry Cuyler Bunner led a movement that changed the face of politics, arts, and literature in America. The editor-in-chief of Puck Magazine, America's first successful political comic weekly, Bunner was also the author of the 1883 essay "New York As a Field for Fiction" which laid out the structure for a new genre, the New York story, exemplified by Edith Wharton's novella Bunner Sisters.