100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1980–1990

Series editor Shannon Ravenel simplified The Best American Short Stories. She got rid of most of the lists and of the series editor’s foreword, keeping only the list of magazines and biographical notes. In 1987 she did, however, institute the contributors’ notes, brief essays by the stories’ authors describing their inspirations for their chosen pieces. Here they often revealed intimate truths about the writing process. Charles Baxter described “desk pounding, swearing, and pages flung into wastebaskets.” Madison Smartt Bell admitted, “I still sometimes wish I could have made [this story] just a little shorter.” Joy Williams wrote, “It is the unsayable which prompts writing in the first place.”

Ravenel referred to the 1980s as “another golden age” for short stories. Because of the growing number of MFA programs and literary journals, the latter made possible by a larger budget for literature in the National Endowment for the Arts and stronger state arts councils, the amount of short fiction published each year increased. And story collections and anthologies were more frequently reviewed in magazines and newspapers. In 1977 Ravenel read 900 short stories, in 1989 over 2,000. She said, “The short story in the 1980s was it.”

Ravenel worked with such guest editors as Joyce Carol Oates, Hortense Calisher, Gail Godwin, Raymond Carver, and Ann Beattie. “Each of the guest editors was different,” she noted. “John Updike wanted control over the Distinguished Others list. Anne Tyler wanted to know if I had a secret list of my own (I did) and how closely our two lists corresponded (80 percent). Stanley Elkin asked me to his home to discuss each of his selections and I argued him out of one and into a replacement.” Her most memorable experience may have been with John Gardner:

Just before it was time for me to send him the tear sheets of my 120 selected stories, I broke my leg (roller skating with my kids), but I managed to Xerox all the tear sheets, package up the originals, and get them off to Mr. Gardner by my deadline… Two weeks later, I had a phone call: John Gardner did not like a single one of the 120 stories I had sent him and wanted me to ship him the magazines so he could do his own reading and selection. Well. That year I had subscriptions to 151 magazines. Most of them were quarterlies, though many were monthly and at least one supplied 52 issues. So there was a huge pile in our basement that I was supposed to package up and mail to John Gardner. I did it, with my husband’s help… As it turned out, John Gardner selected nine of my 120 and found another eleven on his own. The “100 Other Distinguished Short Stories” in the back of the 1981 volume are mine. All I can say is that all the rest of the volumes I edited were breezes in comparison.

In 1982 Ravenel cofounded Algonquin Books, devoted to publishing new writers. She also created the series New Stories from the South. She continued the tradition of supporting small magazines and new writers in The Best American Short Stories: Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Charles Baxter, Ethan Canin, Richard Ford, Amy Hempel, and Mona Simpson all appeared in the series early in their careers.

Divorce, addiction, and AIDS were concerns for writers in the 1980s. Others wrote of the psychological aftermath of the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien’s story “The Things They Carried” was an unforgettable indictment of that war. As Ravenel wrote, he “has taken the plainest kind of communication, the list, and turned the form itself into the theme of his powerful story.”

In his introduction, guest editor John Gardner bemoaned the number of authors employing the present tense in their stories, writing that “the present tense turns out to be, itself, the message: One may with great sensitivity watch things happen… but one is silly to expect anything. Life, if one wishes to call it that, goes on: consciousness is all.”

Minimalism — or as John Barth referred to it, “‘K-Mart realism,’ ‘hick chic,’ ‘Diet-Pepsi minimalism’ and ‘post-Vietnam, post-literary, postmodernist blue-collar neo-early-Hemingwayism’”—was also popular in the 1980s, possibly due to a weariness from the war in Vietnam and the American culture of excess. In 1986 Anne Tyler wrote, “Even the sparest in style implies a torrent of additional details barely suppressed, bursting through the seams.” Others recoiled at the trend. In 1988 guest editor Mark Helprin stated, “No better illumination of the pitfalls of the collective impulse exists than the school of the minimalists… Their characters always seem to have a health problem… How so many people can be sitting in so many diners, trailers, and pickup trucks with so many ingrown toenails, varicose veins, corns, bunions, boils… is the secret of the Sphinx.”