The Best American Short Stories of the Century.

John Updike, Katrina Kenison.

Foreword.

EDWARD j. O'BRIEN was twenty-three years old, already a published poet and playwright, when he began work on the first volume of The Best American Short Stories. He sold the idea to the Boston house of Small, Maynard & Company, which launched the series in 1915. "Because an American publisher has been found who shares my faith in the democratic future of the American short story as something by no means ephemeral,"

he wrote in his first introduction, "this yearbook of American fiction is assured of annual publication for several years."

Nearly eight-five years and eighty-five volumes later, the annual anthology that a young Harvard graduate envisioned on the eve of World War I has become not only an institution but an invaluable record of our century.

Although the series was briefly published by Dodd, Mead & Company before it became an integral part of the Houghton Mifflin list in 1933, it has been published without interruption every year since its inception.

In almost all respects, the world we now inhabit is vastly different from the world that is reflected in the earliest volumes. In the first years of the century, America was receiving tides of immigrants; indeed, immigration was perhaps the greatest human story of the time, and its themes reverber-ated in the stories O'Brien found. The orderly evolution of a national literature, as could be traced in a more homogeneous European culture, was nearly impossible to discern in the United States. But O'Brien saw virtue in our diversity, and while other critics of the time dismissed American fiction for its lack of sophistication and technique, he detected stirrings of something altogether new - a distinctly American literature worth recognizing and encouraging on its own terms.

O'Brien sensed that the short story was about to come into its own as a particularly American genre, and he presciently set out, as he explained, "to viii

Foreword.

trace its development and changing standards from year to year as the field of its interest widens and its technique becomes more and more assured."

If anything, O'Brien's ability to spot and crusade for quality fiction seems all the more remarkable from our vantage point. Upon Sherwood Anderson's first appearance in print, in 1916, O'Brien recognized both a new talent of the first rank and the real emergence of the modern short story. "Out of Chicago have come a band of writers, including Anderson, Ben Hecht, Lindsay, Masters, and Sandburg," he announced, "with an altogether new substance, saturated with the truth of the life they are experiencing."

Suddenly, it seemed, fiction was being written that was worthy of the devotion O'Brien was ready to bring to it. "This fight for sincerity in the short story is a fight that is worth making," he wrote in 1920. "It is at the heart of all that for which I am striving. The quiet sincere man who has something to tell you should not be talked down by the noisemakers. He should have his hearing. He is real. And we need him. That is why I have set myself the annual task of reading so many short stories."

The results of O'Brien's labors over the next twenty years are revealed in the roster of authors who found early recognition and support in his anthology, including Ring Lardner, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, J. P.

Marquand, Dorothy Parker, Erskine Caldwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Irwin Shaw, Kay Boyle, and Richard Wright.

In 1923, O'Brien broke his own cardinal rule - that only previously published short stories are eligible for consideration - in order to publish a short story by a struggling young writer he had just met in Switzerland.

All of Ernest Hemingway's short stories to date had been rejected by editors; when he met O'Brien, he poured out a tragic tale of a lost suitcase full of manuscripts and admitted that he was so discouraged he was ready to give up writing. O'Brien asked to see the two stories he had left, and decided to publish one of them, "My Old Man." He not only gave Hemingway his first publication, he dedicated that year's volume to Hemingway, then a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Toronto Star, thereby launch-ing one of the most celebrated literary careers of our century.

Typically, O'Brien would spend the entire weekend ensconced in his upstairs study, emerging only for meals. By Monday morning, he would have read through the week's worth of periodicals from both America and Great Britain (he also edited an annual anthology of the best British short stories), and he would have filed and graded every short story published during the previous week. Some years, he estimated that he read as many as 8,000 short stories.

Foreword.

ix If he hadn't been a literary editor, O'Brien might well have found fulfillment as a statistician. Indeed, he brought nearly as much zeal to the tables and charts at the back of the books as he did to selecting the stories themselves. First he divided all of the stories he read into four groups, according to their merit. In addition, he provided his readers with a fully annotated index of all short stories published during the year; a separate index of critical articles on the short story and noteworthy reviews published on both sides of the Atlantic; addresses of American magazines publishing short stories; author biographies for all the writers included on his Roll of Honor (as well as those whose work appeared in the book); a Roll of Honor of foreign short stories in American magazines; a critical summary of the best books of short stories published during the year; an index of foreign short stories translated into English; an elaborate chart of magazine averages based on the number of "distinguished" stories he found in each; an index of all the short stories published in books; and, finally, a bibliog-raphy of all of the British and American short story collections published in the course of the year. In the 1918 volume, O'Brien's "Yearbook of the American Short Story" ran for 108 pages - fully one third of the book.

To a modern sensibility, O'Brien's sundry lists and grading systems seem excessive at best, fussy and arbitrary at worst. But O'Brien was blessed with a confidence - and perhaps a naive optimism as well - that no contemporary editor could match. He knew that he could stake out his territory and cover it all, that nothing would slip through the cracks, and that at year's end, he could survey America's short story landscape and feel certain that he had left no rock unturned. Today we offer these annual volumes accompanied by caveats - that we do the best we can; that we try to lay eyes on everything, but to do so is simply impossible; and that "best" is a purely subjective adjective, reflecting no more than a particular reader's sensibility at a particular moment in time. The publishing world has grown too large, and we readers too exhausted by sheer volume, for it to be any other way. I read through the hundreds of issues of the three hundred-plus periodicals to which I subscribe with the uneasy awareness that I can never keep up, that the 'zines, electronic media, desktop publications, college journals, and literary magazines are all part of a landscape that I will never fully excavate, no matter how many hours I spend mining it. There was no doubt in O'Brien's mind that the stories he published were in fact "the best," at least according to his criteria. One can't help but envy both the clarity of his task and the confidence with which he executed it.

An ardent Anglophile, O'Brien spent most of his adult life in England.

When war broke out, he chose not to return to the safety of America. He x Foreword was killed in London amid falling bombs on February 24, i94i> at age fifty-one. In the midst of all the blitzkrieg coverage, newspapers all over Europe paid extensive homage to this man who was considered a vital representative of American literature.

O'Brien's death coincided with the end of Martha Foley's marriage to the writer and publisher Whit Burnett. Together they had founded the influential literary magazine Story and had presided over its publication for ten years. In fact, Edward O'Brien had called the years from 1931 to 1941 "the Story decade," so influential had the magazine become as a proving ground for new writers.

Once, while visiting O'Brien in London, Martha Foley had asked him what would ever become of The Best American Short Stories if something should happen to him. O'Brien had casually replied, "Oh, you'll take care of it." As it turned out, Houghton Mifflin turned immediately to the editors of Story after O'Brien's sudden death and offered them both the job. According to Foley, "Whit said he didn't want to read all those damn magazines."

And so, in 1941, Foley left both Burnett and Story behind to "take care of"

The Best American Short Stones. It was a job she would perform tenaciously for the next thirty-seven years.

By the time she stepped into her new role, Martha Foley was already famous among writers as a passionate advocate for serious literature. As coeditor of Story, she had, as Irwin Shaw wrote, "kept the flag, tattered but brave, flying, and held out glimmers of hope for all of us." Now, as the most powerful and most visible arbiter of taste in short fiction in America, she set out to find stories of literary value that might otherwise remain unknown and forgotten, and to give them permanence in book form. Like her predecessor, she believed that our literature was a reflection of our national soul, and that as such it was worth defending. "Against the tragic backdrop of world events today a collection of short stories may appear very unim-portant," she wrote in her first introduction, in 1942. "Nevertheless, since the short story always has been America's own typical form of literary expression, from Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe onward, and since America is defending today what is her own, the short story has a right to be considered as among the cultural institutions the country now is fighting to save.... In its short stories, America can hear something being said that can be heard even above the crashing of bombs and the march of Panzer divisions. That is the fact that America is aware of human values as never before, posed as they are against a Nazi conception of a world dead to such values."

Foley continued to make, as she had at Story, a distinction between Foreword xi established writers and the new ones just finding their way, observing that "while their writing is often uncertain, it always is fresh and stimulating."

Similarly, she paid particular attention to the small and regional magazines that nurtured these emerging voices. Her efforts were well rewarded. During her reign as series editor, she was among the first to recognize the talents of dozens of writers who would go on to receive wide acclaim, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Stanley Elkin, Del-more Schwartz, Flannery O'Connor, W. H. Gass, Vladimir Nabokov, Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, Joyce Carol Oates, J. F. Powers, Ray Bradbury, Lionel Trilling, Shirley Jackson, Jack Kerouac, James Agee, John Updike, Robert Coover, and Jean Stafford.

All through the forties, the fifties, and the sixties, Martha Foley was solely responsible for reading and judging the two thousand or so American stories being published in any given year. She never lacked for good works from which to choose, but she couldn't bear to see the magazine editors, or their contributors, become complacent. Each year she commented, often with brutal frankness, on the stories that had disappointed her, on the writers who seemed to her to be selling out, and on the magazines that were failing to live up to their reputations.

By the late 1950s, she could see the conservatism of the time creeping into fiction, and she protested: "In a land where in the realm of thinking nearly everyone crosses on the green, it would be good to have a few more jaywalkers." She was opinionated and outspoken, and there was never any question about where her loyalties lay - with serious literature and the committed men and women who wrote and published it. Commercialism - fiction as product - was to be fought at all costs. "There used to be a place called Hell," she railed in one introduction, "but the name seems to have been changed to Madison Avenue." She took particular umbrage over magazine editors - "fiction-blind men," as she called them - who tried to foist inferior goods onto the reading public.

Foley spent a lifetime reading and publishing short stories, and she deserved her reputation as "the best friend the short story ever had." But as she advanced in age, her tastes narrowed rather than broadened. Not surprisingly, some readers and critics felt that the volumes were becoming increasingly predictable. In her seventies, and increasingly out of touch with the shifting currents in contemporary fiction, Foley was no longer able to bring the kind of vitality to the series that had once made it the bell-wether of new literary trends.

She spent the last years of her life living alone in a furnished two-room apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts. Although she was in desperate xii

Foreword.

financial straits and plagued by constant back pain, she never considered stepping down from her job. Instead, she put a brave face on her situation, worked each day on her memoirs, and read short stories as she always had.

Martha Foley died, at the age of eighty, on September 5,1977. She had been a major force in American literature for half a century.

For only the second time in the series' sixty-two-year history, Houghton Mifflin had to find someone willing to carry it on. The publishers turned first to Ted Solotaroff, a distinguished editor and critic. Solotaroff declined the position but countered with an idea of his own. Rather than try to replace Martha Foley, he suggested, why not invite a different writer or critic to edit each volume? Houghton Mifflin wisely agreed, noting that "a variety of fresh points of view should add liveliness to the series and provide a new dimension to the title, with 'best' thereby becoming a sequence of informed opinions that gains reliability from its very diversity."

With Solotaroff's agreement to serve as the first guest editor, a new editorial direction was established.

Shannon Ravenel, a bright young literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, had tried to bolster Martha Foley's work during her last years, even offering to scout stories for her. Although most of her assistance was rebuffed, Ravenel had nevertheless become a supporter of the series within the house. She seemed an obvious choice for the role of series editor; it was up to her to preside over the anthology's rebirth. Now, with a different well-known literary figure selecting the stories each year, it seemed that some of the suspense would return to the annual publication of The Best American Short Stones. By 1990, when Ravenel left her post, The Best American Short Stories had once again claimed its place as America's preeminent annual anthology.

In her own first volume, Martha Foley had offered this simple, open-ended definition of a successful short story: "A good short story is a story which is not too long and which gives the reader the feeling he has undergone a memorable experience." In the process of reading 120 or more stories and selecting those that will appear in the book, all guest editors must, at some point, articulate their own criteria - if not by defining what a short story is, then at least by grappling with the questions raised by their own choices. What do they expect from a good short story? How do they judge elements of style, subject, and characterization? Reading through the introductions contributed over the past two decades by some of our foremost writers, one is struck not only by their passionate support for the form but also by their willingness to read, reread, and attempt to quantify a human endeavor that is, in the end, so subjective. If the guest editors as a Foreword xiii group lack Edward O'Brien's supreme self-assurance when it comes to choosing the "best," they bring to their task an abundance of experience, a wide range of viewpoints, and a vitality that could not possibly be contained in or sustained by a single annual editor. What's more, the introductions- all twenty of them now - offer a veritable education in what makes for a successful short story, at least according to some of our most highly regarded practitioners of the art.

"Abjure carelessness in writing, just as you would in life," Raymond Carver advised in 1986.

"I want stories in which the author shows frank concern, not self-protective, 'sensible' detachment," John Gardner wrote in 1982.

"The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange,"

mused Gail Godwin in 1985, "the more you become aware of the universal and the infinite."

In her 1983 introduction, Anne Tyler advocated generosity: "The most appealing short story writer is the one who's a wastrel. He neither hoards his best ideas for something more 'important' (a novel) nor skimps on his material because this is 'only' a short story."

Ten years later, Louise Erdrich backed her up: "The best short stories contain novels. Either they are densely plotted, with each line an insight, or they distill emotions that could easily have spread on for pages, chapters."

Since 1988, when Mark Helprin elected to read the stories with the authors' names blacked out, so that he would not be prejudiced by names or reputations, most of the guest editors of this series have followed suit. As Tobias Wolff wrote in 1994, reading "blind" ensures that one chooses "stories, not writers." As a result, in recent years the collections have featured an extraordinarily rich variety of stories by new writers, as well as works by established writers in the fullness of their powers.

When I took the job of series editor in 1990,1 was conscious, above all, of the dedication with which my three predecessors had presided over this anthology. Edward O'Brien and Martha Foley were, to my mind, almost mythical figures who had died with their boots on, reading stories to the very end. Shannon Ravenel, whose discerning judgment and unerring taste brought her to national prominence in this field, had been largely responsible for bringing the series to a new level of popularity and critical success.

The shoes I was about to step into seemed very large indeed.

Ravenel, echoing Foley, passed on these words of wisdom: "Read everything," she said, "without regard for who wrote it or how you've felt about that author's work in the past." It was good advice. In the course of an average year, I may read three thousand stories published in American and xiv

Foreword.

Canadian periodicals. From these, I cull about 120 to pass on to the guest editor, who then makes the final selection. As we discuss stories and compare notes, a collection begins to come together. I am invariably grateful for the process, which ensures that The Best American Short Stories will never be simply a collection of "the stories I myself like best," as it was for Foley.

During my tenure as series editor, this anthology has been shaped by the tastes and predilections of such varied talents as Robert Stone, Alice Adams, Louise Erdrich, Tobias Wolff, Jane Smiley, John Edgar Wideman, Annie Proulx, and Garrison Keillor. The collections they've assembled are reflections both of who they are and of the healthy vigor of the American short story at the end of this century.

In his introduction to the first volume of The Best American Short Stories, Edward O'Brien wrote, "During the past year, I have read over twenty-two hundred short stories in a critical spirit, and they have made me lastingly hopeful of our literary future." During the past year I have read every one of the two thousand stories that have been collected in these volumes since 1915. It is an experience I would not have missed, and it has made me deeply proud of our literary past.

O'Brien often said that "a year which produced one great story would be an exceptional one." Sometimes, of course, a great story is not recognized as such until later; and sometimes a story that garners much praise when first published fails to withstand the test of time. John Updike, who bears the distinction of being the only living writer whose work has appeared in these volumes in each consecutive decade since the 1950s, generously agreed to take on the daunting challenge of determining which of our century's "best" stories merited inclusion in this volume. When it came to whether or not to include his own work, Mr. Updike deferred to me, although he would not agree to the long story that would have been my choice and insisted on a much shorter piece instead. As witness to Mr.

Updike's scrupulous, and at times agonizing, process of selection and rejection, I can only attest to the painstaking deliberation behind each and every story that appears in this collection. He made it a point to take up these stories decade by decade and to consider each one of them both on its own terms and in the context of our times. Suffice it to say that there is no other writer, editor, or critic alive today who could have performed this task with such acumen and devotion to his fellow writers. He has done us all, readers and writers alike, a great service.

KATRINA KENISON.

Introduction.

THESE STORIES have been four times selected. First, they were selected for publication, against steep odds. Story reports twenty thousand submissions a year, Ploughshares seven hundred fifty a month, The New Yorker five hundred a week. Next, published stories - now amounting annually, Katrina Kenison tells us in her foreword, to three thousand, from over three hundred American journals - were sifted for the annual volumes of the Best American Short Stories of the Year. The eighty-four volumes since 1915 held a total of two thousand stories; Ms. Kenison read all these and gave me more than two hundred, and I asked to read several dozen more. Of this third selection I have selected, with her gracious advice and counsel, these fifty-five - less than one in four. A fathomless ocean of rejection and exclusion surrounds this brave little flotilla, the best of the best.

Certain authors had to be included, that was clear from the outset. An anthology of this century's short fiction that lacked a story by Hemingway, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald would be perversely deficient. Almost as compulsory, I felt, was the female trio of Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. Of postwar writers, there had to be Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, even though only Malamud could be said to have devoted a major portion of his energy to the short story. If John O'Hara and Mary McCarthy - two Irish-Americans with a sociological bent - had been available, I might have included them, but neither ever made a Best. Tradi-tionally, in the compilation of this annual short-story collection, excerpts from a larger work are excluded, though some do creep in; among my choices were a pair, by Jack Kerouac and William Goyen, that turned out to be pieces of novels.

Two personal principles, invented for the occasion, guided me. First, I wanted this selection to reflect the century, with each decade given roughly xvi

Introduction.

equal weight - what amounted to between six and eight stories per decade. As it turned out, the 1950s, with the last-minute elimination of Peter Taylor's "A Wife of Nashville" and James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," were shortchanged, even though it was a healthy decade for short fiction, just before television's tabulations took center stage.

My second rule, enforcing the reflection of an American reality, was to exclude any story that did not take place on this continent or deal with characters from the United States or Anglophone Canada. This would seem to exclude little, and yet in Ms. Kenison's selection I encountered a story about Russian soldiery in World War I ("Chautonville," by Will Levington Comfort), another taking place in a polygamous Chinese household ("The Kitchen Gods," by Guliema Fell Alsop), one involving Gypsies near the Black Sea ("The Death of Murdo," by Konrad Bercovici), a supernatural tale of a woodchopper in New Spain ("The Third Guest," by B. Traven), another of a Czech concert violinist ("The Listener," by John Berry), one set in an African village ("The Hill People," by Elizabeth Marshall), one concerning a magician from nineteenth-century Bratislava ("Eisenheim the Illusionist," by Steven Millhauser), a linked set of Elizabethan epistles dealing with the death of Christopher Marlowe ("A Great Reckoning in a Little Room," by Geoffrey Bush), an astringent account of a Danish semi-orphan ("The Forest," by Ella Leffland), a story beginning "In Munich are many men who look like weasels" ("The Schreuderspitze," by Mark Helprin), several stories of Irish life by Maeve Brennan and Mary Lavin, a lyrical tale of arranged marriage among the Parisian bourgeoisie ("Across the Bridge," by Mavis Gallant), and a deeply feminist, humorously epic account of how a few Latin American women inhabited Antarctica and reached the South Pole some years before Amundsen did ("Sur," by Ursula K. Le Guin). All these are not here. "'That in Aleppo Once . . .,"' by Vladimir Nabokov, and "The Shawl," by Cynthia Ozick, are here, on the weak excuse that some of their characters are on the way (unknowingly, in Ozick's case) to America.

Immigration is a central strand in America's collective story, and the first two stories in my selection deal with the immigrant experience - Jewish in the first case, Irish in the second. The third portrays the rural life, one of drudgery and isolation, that was once the common lot and is presently experienced by a mere one percent of the population, who feed the rest of us - one of the more remarkable shifts the century has witnessed.

The 1920s, which open here with Sherwood Anderson, are a decade with a distinct personality, fixed between the onset of Prohibition in 1920 and the stock market crash of 1929 and marked by a new sharpness and vivacity, xvii Introduction a jazzy American note, in style and in the arts. The urban minority of Americans that produced most of the writing felt superior if not hostile to what H. L. Mencken called the "booboisie," whose votes had brought on Prohibition, puritanical censorship, the Scopes trial, and Calvin Coolidge.

Members of the prospering middle class figure as objects of satire in the fiction of Sinclair Lewis and Ring Lardner, though since both men were sons of the booster-driven Midwest, the satire is more affectionate than it first seemed. Lardner's "Golden Honeymoon" is almost surreal in the circumstantiality of its monologue, a veritable lode of data as to how a certain class of Easterner managed a Florida vacation. The device of the self-incriminating narrator - used here more subtly and gently than in Lardner's better-known "Haircut" - generates a characteriology of American types not to be confused with the author, who may well be sitting at a Paris cafe table in happy expatriation. Except in stories based on his boy-hood, Hemingway couldn't bear to dwell on life in America. It was, for many, a drab, workaday life. The small town or city surrounded by farm-land, adrift in a post-Calvinist dreaminess, with the local doctor the closest thing lo a hero, is a venue ubiquitous in this period's fiction, not only in Anderson and Lewis but in the "Summit" of Hemingway's chilling yet (with its boy narrator) faintly Penrodian "The Killers," and in the Pittsburgh named in Willa Cather's "Double Birthday," a great city as cozy and inturned as a Southern hamlet.

Provincial smugness and bewilderment cease to be quite so urgent a theme in the Depression-darkened thirties. Dorothy Parker's "Here We Are" hovers above its honeymooning couple as if not knowing whether to smile or weep. The heroine of Katherine Anne Porter's "Theft" faces without self-pity the waste of her life amid the passing, predatory contacts of the city. This is a boom period for the short story, a heyday of Story and The American Mercury. With an exuberant, cocky sweep William Saroyan sums up in a few headlong paragraphs a life and the religious mystery, "somehow deathless," of being alive; William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren impart to their Southern microcosms the scope and accumulated intensity of a novelist's vision. Faulkner had previously tucked the denouement of "That Evening Sun Go Down" into his 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury.

Though he was a staple of Best American Short Story collections, represented almost annually in the 1930s, there seemed no avoiding this particular masterpiece, his most anthologized tale, a minimally rhetorical conjuration of impending doom. Fitzgerald's knowing, disheveled tale of Hollywood took preference, narrowly, over his more familiar "Babylon Revisited," a rueful reprise of the twenties' expatriate culture. Alexander xviii

Introduction.

Godin's "My Dead Brother Comes to America" revisits the experience of immigration in a tone of amplifying remembrance that anticipates magic realism. The longest story in these pages, and perhaps the most melodramatic, is Richard Wright's "Bright and Morning Star," a painful relic of a time when American blacks could see their lone friend and best hope in the Communist party. The African-American has inhabited, and to a lamenta-ble degree still inhabits, another country within the United States, where most white signposts of security and stability are absent. I have tried to give this country representation, from Jean Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon" of 1923 to Carolyn Ferrell's "Proper Library" of 1994. Had space permitted, stories by James Baldwin and Ann Petry would have added to the picture's many tints of violence and despair. Even the amiable, detached Ivy Leaguer of James Alan McPherson's "Gold Coast" finds himself, in the end, on the losing side of a racial divide.

I tried not to select stories because they illustrated a theme or portion of the national experience but because they struck me as lively, beautiful, believable, and, in the human news they brought, important. The tempta-tions of the illustrative pulled strongest in the early decades, which were basically historical for me - the times of my fathers. With the 1940s, the times become my own, and the short story takes an inward turn, away from states of society toward states of mind. To an elusive but felt extent, facts become more enigmatic. It is no longer always clear what the author wants us to feel. The short-story writer has gone into competition with the poet, asking the same charged economy of his images as the narrator of The Waste Land, whose narrative lay in shards.

Small-town coziness, with its rules and repressions, is absent from the seething but listless town visited by Eudora Welty's traveling salesman in "The Hitch-Hikers." He thinks of himself: "He is free: helpless." Welty, though habitually linked with her fellow Mississippian Faulkner, here appears more a disciple of Hemingway, and a sister of Flannery O'Connor, the queen of redneck Gothic. Free equals helpless: our American freedom - to thrive, to fail, to hit the road - has a bleak and bitter underside, a noir awareness of ultimate pointlessness that haunts as well the big-city protagonists of Jean Stafford's "The Interior Castle" and E. B. White's "The Second Tree from the Corner." White's story, incidentally, marks the earliest appearance in my selection of The New Yorker, which was founded m 1925.

Its editors, White's wife Katharine foremost, sought for its fiction a light, quick, unforced, casual quality that was slow to catch on with Best American Short Stories and that, however telling in its magazine setting, stacks up as slight against earthier, more strenuous stories. The New Yorker might Introduction xix have ran, but didn't, Elizabeth Bishop's crystalline "The Farmer's Children," an almost unbearably brilliant fable in which farm machinery and Canadian cold become emissaries of an infernal universe; only a poet of genius and a child of misery could have coined this set of wounding, glittering images.

All was not noir: from the bleakest of bases, the burial of a child, Paul Horgan's "The Peach Stone" builds to a redemptive affirmation, and Vladimir Nabokov, portraying the refugee chaos and panic on the edge of Hitler's war, imports into English an early sample of his unique legerde-main. It surprised me that World War II, that all-consuming paroxysm, left so meager a trace in the fiction of this decade, as selected by others. Perhaps it takes time for great events to sift into art; however, I remember the magazines of the forties as being full of stories from the camps and the fronts - many of them no doubt too sentimental and jocular for our taste, but functioning as bulletins to the home front. On request, Ms. Kenison came up with several, including Edward Fenton's harrowing "Burial in the Desert," which depicts the North African campaign's harvest of corpses. In the end only Martha Gellhorn's account of an unsatisfactory flirtation, "Miami-New York," conveyed to me the feel of wartime America - the pervasive dislocation that included erotic opportunity, constant weariness, and contagious recklessness.