100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1960–1970

In keeping with series editor Martha Foley’s notion that the best writing about war usually arrives years later, little reference to Vietnam was made in the fiction that appeared in The Best American Short Stories during the 1960s. As after World War II, stories about fantasy and the supernatural, as well as dreams, crowded magazines. “Ghosts, talking animals, werewolves and the like… [and] dreams,” Foley wrote. “Not, thank heaven, the old device of a character having an extraordinary adventure and waking up to find it was only a dream but dreams as a more tangible part of the story.”

During this time writers also began to explore the hidden complexities of the 1950s “happy family.” Two very different writers were included frequently in the series in these years: John Updike, who was criticized for featuring too little violence in his work, and Joyce Carol Oates, who was criticized for featuring too much.

With the rise of a new counterculture came a new sexual frankness in short fiction. Foley wrote, “The editors of this volume do not believe in censorship, and the stories here represented have been chosen for their literary merits only. Actually, the stories in this volume happen to be more restrained in their use of sex than most of the pieces appearing.”

Feminism, increasingly part of the zeitgeist, was slow to catch on in the short stories that appeared in popular magazines. Women’s magazines ran commercial fiction, typically written by men and featuring benign male characters. Foley wrote, “But women can be bitches in their stories. An editor explained that although her readers were nearly all women she had to be careful not to print anything derogatory about male characters. There can be no wonderful villains as in all fiction of yore. ‘Our publisher and top executives are men. They wouldn’t like it.’ I, personally, refuse to believe that modern men, even publishers, have become so namby-pamby.”

Over the years Foley had maintained a strained friendship with her ex-husband, Whit Burnett, arguing frequently over the support of their son. In 1962 she asked Houghton Mifflin to omit Story from the list of magazines at the back of The Best American Short Stories and refused to read it in consideration for the series. An editor at Houghton Mifflin secretly read the magazine each year to assure that no potential candidates were being omitted.

In 1966 Foley broke her pelvic bone and retired from Columbia. She began instead teaching a small group of adult students at the Gramercy Park Hotel on Wednesday afternoons. She regaled students with tales of her work as a reporter and her crusade for women’s rights, anecdotes about Paris in the twenties and her years as an editor. She talked openly to her students and friends about writers whom she had disliked—“Oh, Hemingway. Hemingway was such a mean bastard. He never did a nice thing for anybody in his life.” One of her favorite tales involved Ray Bradbury. She had chosen a story of his to appear in The Best American Short Stories and soon after got a telegram refusing permission to reprint it. Later she learned that he’d been arguing with a girlfriend, who, without his knowledge, had in fact been the one to send the telegram to Foley.

Foley eventually moved to Maine to live with her brother, who died two days after she arrived. He left no will, and she moved back to New York while his estate was settled. She endured a string of more bad luck: her apartment building in Manhattan burned down, she broke an ankle, “two burglaries [took place] in my apartment, one committed by a man who threatened to kill me (I was too frightened to ask if he wrote short stories).” Although she rarely spoke of it, her son, David, had struggles of his own. Her work began to suffer; the list of magazines at the back of the book became hopelessly outdated. Editors at Houghton Mifflin continued to question her taste: “Not only are the stories of mediocre quality, but there is an overwhelming preoccupation with death, old age, senility, disease, alcoholism in the aged.”

In 1967 Foley moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, and seemed optimistic that her luck would change. She wrote, “I am very happy here. I have a few acres of woods and garden and river and a small contemporary house that is a work of art.”