100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1970–1980

The 1970s saw continued frankness about sex in short fiction, although a scarcity of love stories. Many characters confused love and lust, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sexual revolution and the mood of experimentation. This was the “Me Decade,” as Tom Wolfe called it.

Some writers began to experiment with surrealism and new forms. Series editor Martha Foley believed that “a danger confronting the experimental writer is to forget that style and content should be indivisible.” Influential magazines that published cutting-edge fiction, such as Ontario Review, Fiction International, and New Letters, were founded at this time. Donald Barthelme’s stories appeared five times in the series, but Foley’s taste clearly tended toward realism. She never chose stories by John Barth and only two by Robert Coover.

From 1958 to 1971 Foley’s son was listed as coeditor of The Best American Short Stories, although many people were skeptical about his actual involvement. David was an aspiring painter and was known as a lost soul. He died in 1971 as a result of addiction. His death sent Foley into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. In 1975 she moved to a two-room apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, and became isolated. She was barely able to survive on the $6,000 a year that she earned as the series editor. Again and again she was criticized for her narrowing tastes and predictable choices — Joyce Carol Oates appeared seven times in thirteen years, Peter Taylor six times in ten years.

In 1977 Foley died of heart disease. There was no memorial service or funeral for her. She had named no next of kin and had no living relatives. She left many of her own short stories incomplete, as well as the manuscript for a novel and a draft of a memoir, which was finished by Jay Neugeboren and published as The Story of Story Magazine in 1980.

None of the in-house editors at Houghton Mifflin could agree on how the series should continue. Heated discussions about creating a panel of judges and arguments about whom to approach to fill it ensued. The editors finally decided to ask the critic and editor Ted Solotaroff to oversee the series, but he said no. He did propose that they invite a different writer to steer the volume each year. Houghton Mifflin agreed, and Solotaroff signed on as the first guest editor.

Shannon Ravenel, a young editor who had known Foley at Houghton Mifflin, was asked to serve as the annual series editor. Ravenel had grown up in South Carolina, mostly in Charleston. She said, “I had a mixed raising in ‘low country’ and ‘up country’ South Carolina.” An avid reader since childhood, she had sought work in publishing; “In college (Hollins — all girls) my major (English literature) professor and advisor, Louis Rubin, told me I should NOT go back to Charleston, get married and spend my life socializing and belonging to the Junior League. He told me that I should be an editor (I liked ‘workshopping’ my fellow creative writing students’ work much better than I liked writing my own).” After college Ravenel had moved to Boston and gotten a job in Houghton Mifflin’s trade editorial department as a secretary. “And three or four years into it I was beginning to scratch my way into an editorial job by asking if I might read the literary magazines that the department subscribed to that nobody else seemed to read. Doing that, I ‘discovered’ a couple of new writers that Houghton Mifflin eventually published and I was on my way. I also had the gall to suggest a few stories to the venerable Martha Foley who told me to mind my own business!”

Years later, after Ravenel married and moved to St. Louis, “far from the publishing world which I sorely missed.” She accepted Houghton’s offer to become the new series editor. She would choose 120 stories, from which Solotaroff would select 20. “The first year in my role as series editor,” she said,

I had no magazines, as Ms. Foley had died so recently and the subscriptions were still all in her name (and in her apartment). I scuttled around and found as many as I could in the college and university libraries in St. Louis and managed to submit the tear sheets of 120 of my favorite stories to Mr. Solotaroff, from which he selected his 20 “Best.” Martha Foley had listed many, many other selected titles in the back matter of her volumes — she read all stories published in English, by writers both American and not, and had several categories for her listings. I decided that since the book’s title was Best AMERICAN Short Stories, I would read only work by North American (I read as many Canadian magazines as I could persuade to give me subscriptions) writers and list only 100 “Other Distinguished American Stories” in my back matter.

Ravenel secretly dreaded the complexities of working with a guest editor but admitted that “there is nothing like success to change the directions of one’s ambitions.” Sales of the book quadrupled once the guest editors came on board.

Many writers who were approached for the role of guest editor declined. When asked, Peter Taylor wrote, “I’d love to read those stories and select my favorites, but then I know too well how I would put off writing the preface. And finally I would do a hurried, lousy job of it! The trouble with being old and wise is that you know everything about yourself too well.” That same year Walker Percy replied, “It’s an honor, but I’ve got too much to do to read all those stories. You might be interested to know that we have a little book club that meets biweekly. We read and discuss 3 or 4 short stories. Just finished Raymond Carver’s 1986 BASS. Going to Anne Tyler next.”