100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1915–1920

At the turn of the twentieth century, short stories were a preferred form of entertainment in the United States. This was a boom time for magazine publishing, owing in part to developments in offset printing technology as well as to the Postal Act of 1879, which had granted magazines discounted mailing rates. Publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Delineator, all of which published short stories, sold more than a half million copies per issue. The authors of these stories were well known at the time and often well paid.

A certain formula became evident: a predictable plot tied up neatly with a happy ending. Most short stories were folksy in tone and told in a breezy third-person narration of homespun heroes, lovable detectives, or quirky salesmen, the literary equivalent of the Norman Rockwell paintings beside which they sometimes appeared.

In 1906 the poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite published the first of his annual surveys of American poetry in the Boston Evening Transcript. Over the following years he became a mentor to a young poet and playwright, Edward J. O’Brien. Braithwaite’s editor at the Transcript suggested that the newspaper publish a companion to the poetry surveys, an annual survey of American short stories, and Braithwaite, overextended at the time, enlisted the help of his protégé.

O’Brien had grown up in Boston and since childhood had been a devout reader. He suffered from a heart condition, and during long periods of illness, he’d surrounded himself with books by Poe, Thackeray, Dickens, Dumas, and Balzac, among others. Because of his condition, which he kept largely secret throughout his life, he was unusually pale. Cecil Roberts, a poet and editor, said, “He had such a pathetic air, with his ill-dress, attenuated body, his wistful blue eyes, and unkempt appearance.” O’Brien did, however, benefit from all his reading. He graduated from high school at the age of sixteen, attended Boston College, and transferred to Harvard, but he soon dropped out. He wrote, “I decided not to entrust my education to professors any longer, but to educate myself as long as life lasted.”

When he began his new venture with Braithwaite, O’Brien was well aware — and wary — of the reign of commercial short fiction. Authors and readers had also begun to object to the formulaic writing that was flooding newsstands. Even some fiction editors had grown concerned. For example, Burton Kline wrote, “As an editor I have a feeling that some of the writers who should be railroad presidents or bank directors are getting in the way of real writers that I ought to be discovering.” O’Brien decided that this new survey would be a chance to showcase literary fiction. He wrote to hundreds of magazines of all sizes, informing editors of the project and asking for free copies of the year’s issues. He was surprised by the many responses, and near the end of the year he wrote, “We underestimated the number of stories. There are about 800 in all.” Months later, he guessed that he had read 2,500 stories that year.

Eventually O’Brien submitted a proposal for an annual anthology of American short stories, edited by him, to a Boston book publisher, who loved the idea. He laid out his criteria in his first foreword and reprinted it nearly verbatim each year. He vowed impartiality and defined his views of substance and form: “A fact or group of facts in a story only obtain substantial embodiment when the artist’s power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth… The first test of a story… is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected facts or incidents… The true artist, however, will seek to shape this living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skillful selection and arrangement of his material, and by the most direct and appealing presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.”

Authors like Fannie Hurst, Maxwell Struthers Burt, Benjamin Rosenblatt, and Wilbur Daniel Steele appeared several times in the early years of The Best American Short Stories. These and other contributors — Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Edna Ferber — ushered in a new and unflinching realism in American short fiction, as well as humor and more subtle characterization. Burt wrote, “I do prefer the ‘I’ narrator greatly. It does away with the ‘Smart Alec’ omniscient narrator of the third person, which seems to me the bane of most American short-stories.”

O’Brien was almost pathologically organized, a trait likely necessary for the amount of work on his desk. He created an extensive tracking system and in the book featured indexes of every American and British story, story collection, and relevant article published each year, among seemingly endless other lists and summaries. He even included a necrology of writers.

Despite his work, commercial short fiction continued its reign on newsstands through the decade. In fact, O’Brien felt that the quality of literary short fiction lessened during the First World War. In 1918 he wrote, “If we are to make our war experience the beginning of a usable past, we must not sentimentalize it on the one hand, nor denaturalize it on the other.” He guessed that it would be many years before writers could write about the war with any objectivity. (He was called before a draft board but was exempted on physical grounds.)