A Year of U. S. Short Stories
WEBSTER, HARVEY CURTIS
A Year of U.S. Short Stories The Best American Short Stories 1955. Edited by Martha Foley. Houghton, Mifflin. 404 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Professor of literature, Louisville...
...I say this only to point to the undue neglect of intelligent selections of short stories such as Martha Foley's Best or Paul Engle's 0. Henry memorial volumes, which surpass any collection you can make of 0. Henry...
...We have had our adventures too early...
...A quick once-over of this collection of all good, many excellent stories shows that we are still living in the age of anxiety which cold war and H-bombs compel...
...Our love has turned to affection, our hate to distaste...
...Shaw's insight: Robert Bowen's naturalistic story about a Korean veteran who decides pain is better than a lobotomy...
...Since no one except someone as dedicated as Miss Foley can read almost everything, we should buy and honor a collection that prints entire 25 "best" stories (all of them illuminating and worth the reading), a list of 76 roll-of-honor stories, of 31 distinctive volumes of short stories, and of more than 250 distinctive short stories in U.S...
...For Harvey Swados, whose good story is too compressed and inferior to his very good novel Out Went the Candle, you have to know Freud, Marx and people, and then maybe...
...Our generation is in danger," says a character in Irwin Shaw's excellent, faintly slick story, "the danger of diminution...
...A dozen of these 25 confirm Mr...
...author, "On a Darkling Plain" In the society that is not yet, collections of short stories such as Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories 1955 will be honored more or as much as the best of novels...
...an excellent revelation of a well-to-do suburbanite who confuses "a lack of discrimination with Christian love...
...I believe also that stories must be told well (as these are) and enjoyable (as these are to those who are concerned deeply about the contemporary situation and know good writing when they read it...
...Two good semi-science-fiction stories by Howard Nemerov and Judith Merrill that point at the uncertainty of the world beyond what we call the real one...
...The magazines range from the almost unknown (Epoch published at Cornell, Shenandoah published at Washington and Lee) to the ones the highly-browed dismiss without reading (the Saturday Evening Post, Charm, the Ladies Home Journal...
...Microcosms reveal macrocosms...
...Irwin Shaw thinks we must abandon phoney expatriatism, Oliver La Farge that we must not trust the scientific outlook which is no more than scientific (likewise David Stuart in "Bird Man," one of the best stories...
...Whether one is made happy by these fine revelations of our age's anxiety is not the point...
...We have settled for the life of obedient dwarfs in a small but fatal sideshow...
...George P. Elliot's "Brother Quintillian and Dick the Chemist...
...There are those that are better and those that are worse, of course, in this selection...
...And why one of Mark Van Doren's lesser stories (when there are so many good ones...
...Wallace Stegner believes, evidently, that we must put behind us the Bohemian puritanism of the Twenties (though it was pleasant, wasn't it...
...They state what they see, suggestively diagnose, can't give the magic pill any better than your psychiatrist or Eisenhower...
...Aside from the excellent stories one expects from Oliver La Farge, John Cheever, Wallace Stegner, Irwin Shaw and Eudora Welty, the best stories are those by Daniel Curley, Nancy Chaikin, Flannery O'Connor and Howard Nemerov...
...I do not say this to deprecate the novel (extension is sometimes as necessary as compression), certainly not to deprecate poetry, the greatest art form when it is great...
...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Professor of literature, Louisville University...
...Since 1941, Miss Foley has been doing an excellent imperfect job of selecting the best short stories that appear in almost a hundred little and big magazines published in the United States and Canada...
...Daniel Curley's moving story of two lovers who don't know where to go, what to do, or how to believe...
...the seemingly slight and restricted show things as important as the character of a generation, a class, a society, a representative kind of man, a universal human experience particularized...
...In the society that is, too many potentially good readers (which is to say good people) prefer quantity to quality and do not realize that 404 pages of short stories at $3.50 are more valuable than ten goodish novels at S4.50 each...
...Like poetry, the other form which a better society will honor more than ours, the short story compactly and vividly suggests many times the meaning it superficially conveys...
...No selection satisfies everyone, but this one should be read by as many people as possible so that their dissatisfaction will help them to get from the society that is to the one that is not yet...
...I do think so...
...I dare say I have been writing rather formidably, as though life might be saved by literature...
...magazines...
...But why, I must inquire ungraciously, exclude Shirley Ann Grau and Herbert Gold...
...John Cheever's "The Country Husband...
...about an atheist with faith and a Brother who doubts himself into belief...
...Of course, none of these writers are defeated (would they write if they were...
...this is what the sensitive feel and what we all must cope with...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 3
