100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1920–1930

Series editor Edward O’Brien wrote, “In Boston, I am below the salt with the Beacon Hill Yankees and above the salt with the South Boston Irish. There’s no place for me.” In 1919, after traveling in France and Rome, he settled in Oxford, England. But he continued to travel — in Italy, where he befriended Ezra Pound; in Paris, where he met James Joyce. O’Brien soon met the woman who would become his wife, Romer Wilson, a British writer known primarily for her biography of Emily Brontë.

He continued to balance a large number of projects with The Best American Short Stories: books of poetry and religious prose poems, biographies of Gauguin and Nietzsche. In 1922 he began coediting The Best British Short Stories.

In 1923 O’Brien met Ernest Hemingway, a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Toronto Star. Hemingway lamented that his wife, Hadley Richardson, had lost a suitcase of his manuscripts. He was despondent and wanted to quit writing. O’Brien asked to see Hemingway’s only two remaining stories and elected to publish one, “My Old Man,” in that year’s Best American Short Stories. It was the first and last time that O’Brien broke his own rule of selecting only published stories. And it was Hemingway’s first major publication.

The 1920s were a fertile time for literary American short fiction. As O’Brien wrote, “Even the best stories were built like Fords fifteen years ago, while now there are probably forty or fifty young writers who see life freshly, render it clearly, and write without a thought of pandering to editorial prejudices.” Sentimentality on the page was replaced by what O’Brien termed “saturation in the physical scene.” Writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Ring Lardner “communicate to us with nearly complete disinterestedness as well as personal interest what the senses of sight and hearing have brought to them in the circles of the world in which they move.” O’Brien went on to write, “[Hemingway] conceals the tenderness of his heart by an attitude of bravado… This is a very common and beautiful attitude in American youth since the war.”

O’Brien questioned the number of American writers living in Paris during the 1920s, worrying that so many artists living in close proximity created “sterile inbreeding”—a certain sameness in their fiction.

The Best American Short Stories gained some popularity, but fans of commercial fiction objected to O’Brien’s “obscure” taste. Critics railed against his “dull, predictable” choices, stories that delivered anything but the “living truth” he promised in his forewords. They thought he was losing touch with the essence of American culture by living across the Atlantic. They also found his tone elitist. In almost every foreword he bemoaned the current fads of short fiction as well as the hazards of commercial editors and publishers. Some critics labeled Irvin S. Cobb, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, and Konrad Bercovici, whose work was featured in the book, “perverting” influences. One even reacted to the idea of an anthology of the short story: “Overindulgence in the short story is a dissipation which produces an inevitable reaction; it leaves the mind in a jerky state… the perfect short-story is like champagne, scarcely able to be taken in as the sole article of diet.” O’Brien’s response was “The public… is beginning to have an opinion of its own and much more discrimination than the editors and critics who wish to legislate for it.”

O’Brien championed small literary journals, especially those in the Midwest, like Prairie Schooner and The Midland. In 1929 he wrote presciently, “Two generations ago, Boston was the geographical centre of American literary life, one generation ago New York… and I suggest that the geographical centre to-day is Iowa City.” Seven years later the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the country’s best writing programs, was founded.

O’Brien and his wife had a son, Johnny, in 1924. Not long after, Romer was diagnosed with cancer and grew sick. In 1930 she passed away. Her death coincided with the onset of the Great Depression.