100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1940–1950

The New Yorker was established in 1925, and in its early years published short stories that were typically comic. The magazine’s reputation for publishing only humor caused critics to pay less attention to its stories, although pieces by Dorothy Parker, Emily Hahn, and Morley Callaghan did appear in The Best American Short Stories over the years. In 1940 Katharine White, fiction editor for the magazine, decided to publish an anthology of stories. In a memo to her boss, White wrote, “What this book should be, as I see it, is a distinguished collection of short stories which, though we didn’t set out to do it, we seemed to have amassed during the years. It would be mostly savage, serious, moving, or just well-written fiction with some that are funny in part.”

White’s anthology brought the desired recognition. In 1941 alone, series editor Edward O’Brien chose three stories from the magazine to appear in The Best American Short Stories. Four appeared in the next volume. O’Brien’s vision meshed with White’s definition of a “New Yorker short story,” a story that traces a development of character or situation “free of the burden of plot.”

O’Brien died in 1941 of a heart attack. His mother was probably the only one who knew of the heart condition that had plagued him most of his life. She had stayed near him, to the despair of his wives, throughout the years, most likely to monitor his health and well-being. His death was widely reported, even during this time of war.

A decade before his death, O’Brien had suggested to Martha Foley that she and Whit Burnett would be the logical successors for his job should anything happen to him. When he died, Houghton Mifflin approached Foley about taking over the job, and in 1941 she parted ways with both Burnett and Story and began editing the series.

Like O’Brien, Foley had grown up in Boston. She had dropped out of Boston University, become a copy editor in New York and, soon after, a journalist in California. Like Burnett, she wrote fiction. O’Brien had chosen many of her stories to appear in The Best American Short Stories. Foley was an ardent feminist and socialist; when she was twenty, she was arrested and jailed for protesting about women’s rights at a rally for President Woodrow Wilson. She had bright red hair and smoked from a cigarette holder.

When she took the helm of the series, she defined a good short story more loosely than O’Brien had: “A good short story is a story which is not too long and which gives the reader the feeling he has undergone a memorable experience.” Perhaps, given O’Brien’s mixed reception in his early years of overseeing the series, this generality served as insurance against future critics.

Foley paid tribute to O’Brien in each foreword. She also supported small and regional magazines. She was equally opposed to commercialism and agreed that the series should be a vehicle to promote literary stories. She wrote, “Unfortunately most people never see these [literary] magazines because few ever appear on newsstands, owing to a monopolistic distribution system and the usurpation of all the media by advertisers in the last half-century.” Though the general popularity of short stories had begun to wane, Foley noted that the overall literary quality had improved. In her first foreword, she declared that “the lifelessly plotted story, with the forced happy or trick ending, is dying, slowly but surely dying.”

Foley’s reading process was less orderly than O’Brien’s. She kept a supply of colored index cards and on each wrote the author’s name, the title of the story, the name and date of the magazine, and a few words to jog her memory about the story itself. Those she found superlative were given orange cards; those “quite good” got blue cards; “above average” stories got white. “The others I try to forget.” She read in fits and starts, never on regular days, and often she found herself weeks behind.

Foley had a keen eye for fictional trends. In 1943 came “a multitude of stories obviously written with the word ‘escape’ in the minds of their authors and often so labeled by the editors seeking them. And, because their authors are so desperately and self-consciously in flight from any reality, the stories themselves lack significance.” She later noted in that year a preponderance of “non-realistic” or fantasy stories, some with overtones of “mysticism”: “In modern atom-bomb-inventing, airplane-traveling, electrically powered United States of America the newest widespread literary development is, of all things, a re-emergence of the old-fashioned ghost story!” She observed that writing had become more sentimental after the war: “Writers are no longer afraid of their emotions.” Foley posited, as O’Brien had, that the best writing about a war comes a generation later: “It often has been noted that the great stories of the last World War were not written until after the conflict had ended. There had to come a distillation of the profound events writers, like their countries, had undergone.”

Foley championed the rise of “minority literature,” especially black writers. She also kept a close eye on opportunities for women in fiction, as well as on the role of female characters. She was offered a job hosting a feminist radio talk show, and her speech coach, Ludwig Donath, a well-known Austrian actor, connected her with a Viennese friend who rented Foley a small seaside house in Santa Monica. Here she met Berthold Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Charlie Chaplin. Foley wrote about the Chaplins’ visits to her friend’s house, about Oona Chaplin “silently knitting afghans.” She later regaled friends with stories about Greta Garbo and their occasional lunches of “cottage cheese and a salad” while discussing Garbo’s childhood.

Foley guessed that TV would threaten magazine and book readership and deplete audiences at movie theaters. Writers such as Gore Vidal and Horton Foote began to earn decent money — and fame — by writing teleplays. J. D. Salinger, whose first story had been published in Story, never allowed the televising of any of his stories. When Foley chided him, saying, “If all good writers take your attitude, television will be as bad as Hollywood,” Salinger replied, “The writing was on the wall before the wall was even there.”