Frank R. Stockton was born in 1834. His  46  famous stories are in the form of fairy tales, ghost stories, or romances. But in all of them his humor has an edge  47  a knife. When “The Lady, or the Tiger?” was published in Century Magazine in 1882, it caused excitement  48  country. Hundreds of people wrote letters to the magazine or to their newspapers about it. Many letters demanded  49  the question that the story asks. Others asked  50  the story was really about government, or psychology, or the battle of the sexes, or something else. Wisely, Stockton never answered any of the letters. The story remains as fresh today as it was then.