O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920. Various
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August 21). Hartman, Lee Foster, The Judgment of Vulcan (Harper's, March). Hergesheimer, Joseph, "Read Them and Weep" (Century, January). Hooker, Brian, Branwen (Romance, June). Hull, Alexander, The Argosies (Scribner's, September). Hume, Wilkie, The Metamorphosis of High Yaller (Live Stories, June). Kabler, Hugh, Fools First (Saturday Evening Post, November 20). Kerr, Sophie, Divine Waste (Woman's Home Companion, May). La Motte, Widows and Orphans (Century, September). Lewis, O. F., Alma Mater (Red Book, June). Sparks That Flash in the Night (Red Book, October). Marquis, Don Kale (Everybody's, September); Death and Old Man Murtrie (New Republic, February 4). Marshall, Edison, Brother Bill the Elk (Blue Book, May). Means, E. K., The Ten-Share Horse (Munsey's, May). Miller, Alice Duer, Slow Poison (Saturday Evening Post, June 12). Montague, Margaret Prescott, Uncle Sam of Freedom Ridge (Atlantic Monthly, June). [4]Mumford, Ethel Watts, A Look of the Copperleys (Ladies Home Journal, April); Red Gulls (Pictorial Review, October). Newell, Maude Woodruff, Salvage (Green Book, July). Noyes, Frances Newbold, "Contact!" [5] (Pictorial Review, December). Pelley, William Dudley, The Face in the Window (Red Book, May); The Show-Down (Red Book, June). Perry, Lawrence, The Real Game (Everybody's, July). A Matter of Loyalty (Red Book, July); The Lothario of the Seabird (Ladies Home Journal, August); The Rocks of Avalon (Red Book, December). Post, Melville Davisson, The House by the Loch (Hearst's, May). Redington, Sarah, A Certain Rich Woman (Outlook, May 5). Reid, M. F., Doodle Buys a Bull Pup (Everybody's, August). Richardson, Norval, The Bracelet (McClure's, July). Robbins, L.H., "Ain't This the Darnedest World?" (American, May); Professor Todd's Used Car (Everybody's, July). "Rutledge, Marice," The Thing They Loved (Century, May). Ryan, Kathryn White, A Man of Cone (Munsey's, March). Scarborough, Dorothy, The Drought (Century, May). "Sidney, Rose," Butterflies (Pictorial Review, September). Smith, Gordon Arthur, No Flowers (Harper's, May); The Aristocrat (Harper's, November). Steele, Wilbur Daniel, Both Judge and Jury (Harper's, January); God's Mercy (Pictorial Review, July); Footfalls (Pictorial Review, October). Synon, Mary, On Scarlet Wings (Red Book, July). Titus, Harold, Aliens (Ladies Home Journal, May). Tuckerman, Arthur, Black Magic, (Scribner's, August). Welles, Harriet, According to Ruskin (Woman's Home Companion, June); Distracting Adeline (Scribner's, May). Whitman, Stephen French, The Last Room of All (Harper's, June). Wilkes, Allene Tupper, Toop Goes Skating (Woman's Home Companion, November).
[Footnote 3: Listed alphabetically by authors.]
[Footnote 4: A member of the Committee of Award, this author refused as a matter of course to allow consideration of her stories for republication here or for the prizes. But the other members insist upon their being listed, and upon mention of "Red Gulls" as one of the best stories of 1920.]
[Footnote 5: Reprinted as by Frances Noyes Hart.]
From this list were selected seventeen stories which, in the judgment of the Committee, rank highest and which, therefore, are reprinted in this volume.
Since, as will be recalled from the conditions of the award, only American authors were considered, certain familiar foreign names are conspicuously absent. Achmed Abdullah, Stacy Aumonier, F. Britten Austin, Phyllis Bottome, Thomas Burke, Coningsby Dawson, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, Lord Dunsany, John Galsworthy, Perceval Gibbon, Blasco Ibañez, Maurice Level, A. Neil Lyons, Seumas MacManus, Leonard Merrick, Maria Moravsky, Alfred Noyes, May Sinclair and Hugh Walpole all illustrate recovery from the world war. But with their stories the Committee had nothing to do. The Committee cannot forbear mention, however, of "Under the Tulips" (Detective Stories, February 10), one of the two best horror specimens of the year. It is by an Englishwoman, May Edginton.
Half a dozen names from the foreign list just given are synonymous with the best fiction of the period. Yet the short story as practised in its native home continues to excel the short story written in other lands. The English, the Russian, the French, it is being contended in certain quarters, write better literature. They do not, therefore, write better stories. If literature is of a magnificent depth and intricate subtlety in a measure proportionate to its reflection of the vast complexity of a nation that has existed as such for centuries, conceivably it will be facile and clever in a measure proportionate to its reflection of the spirit of the commonwealth which in a few hundred years has acquired a place with age-old empires.
The American short-story is "simple, economical, and brilliantly effective," H.L. Mencken admits.[6] "Yet the same hollowness that marks the American novel," he continues, "also marks the short story." And of "many current makers of magazine short stories," he asseverates, "such stuff has no imaginable relation to life as men live it in the world." He further comments, "the native author of any genuine force and originality is almost invariably found to be under strong foreign influences, either English or Continental."
With due regard for the justice of this slant—that of a student of Shaw, Ibsen, and Nietzsche—we believe that the best stories written in America to-day reflect life, even life that is sordid and dreary or only commonplace. In the New York Evening Post[7] the present writer observed:
"A backward glance over the short stories of the preceding twelve months discovers two facts. There are many of them, approximately between fifteen hundred and two thousand; there are, comparatively, few of merit."
[Footnote 6: The National Letters, in Prejudices, second series, Knopf, N.Y., 1920.]
[Footnote 7: April 24, 1920.]
"You have looked from the rear platform of the limited, across the widening distance, at a town passed a moment ago. A flourishing city, according to the prospectus; a commonplace aggregation of architecture, you say; respectable middle-class homes; time-serving cottages built on the same plan; a heaven-seeking spire; perhaps a work of art in library or townhall. You are rather glad that you have left it behind; rather certain that soon you will have rolled through another, its counterpart.
"But there may be hope, here, of sorts. For a typical American town represents twentieth century life and development, just as current short stories reflect conditions. If the writer failed to represent his age, to reflect its peculiar images, he would not serve it truly."
It is significant that these words preceded by only a few months the publication of Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street," which illustrates in a big and popular way the point in question. Work of satire that it is, it cannot but hold out a solution of the problem presented: in the sweep of the land to the Rockies lies a "dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile."
America is young; its writers are young. But they are reflecting the many-coloured, multiform life of America, in journalism and in art. Quite naturally, they profit by all that has preceded them in other literatures. Since their work stands rooted in romanticism it may legitimately heighten the effects and lights of everyday life.
A glance at the stories republished by the O. Henry Memorial Award Committee for 1920 will reveal their varied nature. The genus Africanus is represented by "Black Art and Ambrose," which has a close second in another on the list, "The Metamorphosis of High Yaller," and a third in "The Ten-Share Horse" of E.K. Means. The tabulation reveals a number of cosmic types—Jewish, Chinese, English, French, Irish, Italian, American. The Chinese character is even more ubiquitous than in 1919, but the tales wherein he figures appear to the Committee to be the last drops in the bucket. Two exceptions occur: "Young China," by Charles Caldwell Dobie, and "Widows and Orphans," by Ellen La Motte. The former knows San Francisco Chinatown, the latter is acquainted with the Oriental at home. One of the Committee regards "The Daughter of the Bernsteins" as the best story of Jewish character. Another sees in it a certain crudeness. Its companions in the year were the tales of Bruno Lessing, Montague Glass, and—in particular—a story by Leon Kelley entitled "Speeches Ain't Business" (Pictorial Review, July).
But this note on the list is a digression. With regard to the stories reprinted, "The Last Room of All" illustrates old-world influence, surely, in its recountal of events in an age long past, the time of the Second Emperor Frederick of Swabia. In its revival of