Making a career of short fiction

Hi everyone,
I just wanted to verify some notions that I've always had about short fiction. I always got the impression that short story collections and/or novella collections/novella+short story collections got published once an author had already published a novel or novels. For some reason, I understood (don't ask me where) that a first time novelist couldn't go out with a collection of shorter works. Is that true?

I'm heading towards a PhD in Creative Writing (hopefully - if I get accepted!) and I've been talking to several CW students who say they want to write only shorter works and are doing short story collections for their dissertations. For me, I've always felt that my writing style works better for shorter works. I tend to write dense, character-based literary stories that are more psychological reality than fast-paced plot type of stories. I've been trying to work on a novel but I'm always getting caught by how weighed down it seems. I know that could be my own unbiast perception, but I'm starting to think that I would enjoy and have more success with shorter works. I enjoy writing short stories but often feel that it's not worth the time to really revise them (talking about 4 or more revisions) because it seems like novel publishing is where ultimately the success is. Also, I'm not sure if you could find an agent sending out a collection of shorter works.

Anyone have any insights on this? I'd like to eventually publish a book-length work (as many as I can ) rather than sending out short stories to magazines.

Tam

Greer,
Thanks for the thoughtful and thorough response. I'm not against revision by any means and I've been doing a lot of it lately - both for grad school and my fiction. I see what you're saying, though - short fiction can work as a suppliment (and is probably necessary) for a teaching career, especially if I plan to teach creative writing (which I hope to do). But for a specific writing career, novels is more of a quick way to go (if you can call getting published quick...)

I guess the bottom line is that I should write what I enjoy and what suits my style and work on getting that perfected and out there to the public eye and the rest will follow.

Thanks for that perspective.

Tam