The Best American Short Stories of the Century
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ISBN-13: 9780395843673
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: 04-20-2000
Pages: 864
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.12(d)
Series: Best American Series (R)
John Updike is the author of numerous books, including the acclaimed "Rabbit" novels, Couples, In the Beauty of the Lilies, and Bech at Bay. He has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1998 he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
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 saidto 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. Traditionally, 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 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 fabulations 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 semiorphan ("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, 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 café table in happy expatriation. Except in stories based on his boyhood, 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 farmland, adrift in a post-Calvinist dreaminess, with the local doctor the closest thing to 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 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 lamentable 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 temptations 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 in 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 have run, 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 legerdemain. 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 Gellhom'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. The fifties, though underrepresented, are represented handsomely, with two of the century's supreme masters of the short story, John Cheerer and Flannery O'Connor. They occupied different parts of the country, of the society, and of the literary world, yet were similar in the authority with which they swiftly built their fictional castles right on the edge of the absurd. They wrote with an inspired compression and heightened clarity; their prose brooked no contradiction or timid withholding of belief. Both were religious - O'Connor, fated to die young, fiercely so - and transcendent currents, perhaps, enabled them to light up their characters like paper lanterns, to impart an electric momentum to their narratives, and to situate human misadventure in a crackling moral context. Both "Greenleaf" and "The Country Husband" display animals - a bull, a dog - as spiritual presences; J. F. Powers's "Death of a Favorite" is told by a cat. The effect is not frivolous. For Powers, like O'Connor a Catholic, the mundane, heavily politicized celibate life of male priests was a serious and all but exclusive obsession. Few story writers of high merit have staked so narrow a territory. And why, the reader may ask, with so many thoroughly crafted works to choose from, have I included a thinly fictionalized piece that drifts off into ellipses and appeared in the ephemeral, chichi Flair? Well, there are some grave turnings caught in the courtly diffidence of Tennessee Williams's "The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin." The narrator, though fearing "that this story will seem to be losing itself like a path that has climbed a hill and then lost itself in an overgrowth of brambles," comes to the double realization that his sister is mentally ill and that he is gay. Overall, there were fewer stories of gay experience than I had expected - not many were written, I think, before 1970 or so - but more about music and its performance; Phillip Lopate's "The Chamber Music Evening" and Charles Baxter's "Harmony of the World" were especially fine and heartfelt, and it pained me to lack space for them. Read an Excerpt
The BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES of the Century
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Copyright © 2000 Houghton Mifflin Company
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0395843677
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.
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Excerpted from The BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES of the Century Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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"A treasure - a one-volume literary history of this country's immeasurable pains and near-infinite hopes." Boston Globe "Finding wonderful stories that you don't already know is one of this collection's great pleasures... " The New York Times "The short story - not to mention America and the twentieth century - at its best." The Wall Street Journal "...a thrillingly energized argument for the enduring vitality of big ideas in small packages." Entertainment WeeklyWhat People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
Table of Contents
Foreword Introduction By John Updike
Zelig By Benjamin Rosenblatt
Little Selves By Mary Lerner
A Jury of Her Peers By Susan Glaspell
The Other Woman By Sherwood Anderson
The Golden Honeymoon By Ring Lardner
Blood-Burning Moon By Jean Toomer
The Killers By Ernest Hemingway
Double Birthday By Willa Cather
Wild Plums By Grace Stone Coates
Theft By Katherine Anne Porter
That Evening Sun Go Down By William Faulkner
Here We Are By Dorothy Parker
Crazy Sunday By F. Scott Fitzgerald
My Dead Brother Comes to America By Alexander Godin
Resurrection of a Life By William Saroyan
Christmas Gift By Robert Penn Warren
Bright and Morning Star By Richard Wright
The Hitch-Hikers By Eudora Welty
The Peach Stone By Paul Horgan
"That in Aleppo Once ..." By Vladimir Nabokov
The Interior Castle By Jean Stafford
Miami - New York By Martha Gellhorn
The Second Tree from the Corner By E. B. White
The Farmer's Children By Elizabeth Bishop
Death of a Favorite By J. F. Powers
The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin By Tennessee Williams
The Country Husband By John Cheever
Greenleaf By Flannery O'Connor
The Ledge By Lawrence Sargent Hall
Defender of the Faith By Philip Roth
Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers By Stanley Elkin
The German Refugee By Bernard Malamud
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? By Joyce Carol Oates
The Rotifer By Mary Ladd Gavell
Gold Coast By James Alan McPherson
The Key By Isaac Bashevis Singer
A City of Churches By Donald Barthelme
How to Win By Rosellen Brown
Roses, Rhododendron By Alice Adams
Verona: A Young Woman Speaks By Harold Brodkey
A Silver Dish By Saul Bellow
Gesturing By John Updike
The Shawl By Cynthia Ozick
Where I'm Calling From By Raymond Carver
Janus By Ann Beattie
The Way We Live Now By Susan Sontag
The Things They Carried By Tim O'Brien
Meneseteung By Alice Munro
You're Ugly, Too By Lorrie Moore
I Want to Live! By Thom Jones
In the Gloaming By Alice Elliott Dark
Proper Library By Carolyn Ferrell
Birthmates By Gish Jen
Soon By Pam Durban
The Half-Skinned Steer By Annie Proulx
Biographical Notes
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