To the Editor of The All-Story Weekly, The Frank A. Munsey Company, Harper and Brothers, The Story-Press Corporation, the Editor of The Bookman, Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., The Curtis Publishing Company, The Atlantic Monthly Company, Charles Scribner’s Sons, The Pictorial Review Company, The Stratford Journal, The Century Company, P. F. Collier & Son, Inc., Captain Achmed Abdullah, Miss Edwina Stanton Babcock, Mr. Charles Caldwell Dobie, Mr. George Humphrey, Captain Arthur Johnson, Mr. Sinclair Lewis, Mr. Harrison Rhodes, Mrs. Fleta Campbell Springer, Mr. Wilbur Daniel Steele, Mr. Edward C. Venable, Mrs. Mary Heaton O’Brien, Mrs. Frances Gilchrist Wood, Captain Gordon Hall Gerould, Miss Katharine Holland Brown, Mr. Burton Kline, Mrs. Mary Mitchell Freedley, Miss Katharine Prescott Moseley, Mr. Julian Street, and Mr. Paul R. Reynolds (on behalf of Mr. William Dudley Pelley).

Acknowledgments are specially due to The Boston Evening Transcript and The New York Tribune for permission to reprint the large body of material previously published in their pages.

I shall be grateful to my readers for corrections, and particularly for suggestions leading to the wider usefulness of this annual volume. In particular, I shall welcome the receipt, from authors, editors, and publishers, of stories published during 1919 which have qualities of distinction, and yet are not printed in periodicals falling under my regular notice. Such communications may be addressed to me at Bass River, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

E. J. O.

Contents

Note. The order in which the stories in this volume are printed is not intended as an indication of their comparative excellence; the arrangement is alphabetical by authors.

[INTRODUCTION]

In reviewing once more the short stories published in American periodicals during the year, it has been interesting, if partly disappointing, to observe the effect that the war has had upon this literary form. While I believe that this effect is not likely to be permanent, and that the final outcome will be a stiffening of fibre, the fact remains that the short stories published during the past ten months show clearly that the war has numbed most writers’ imaginations. This is true, not only of war stories, but of stories in which the war is not directly or indirectly introduced. There has been a marked ebb this year in the quality of the American short story. Life these days is far more imaginative than any fiction can be, and our writers are dazed by its forceful impact. But out of this present confusion a new literature will surely emerge, although the experience we are gaining now will not crystallize into art for at least ten years, and probably not for longer. If this war is to produce American masterpieces, they will be written by men of middle age looking back through the years’ perspective upon the personal experience of their youth. Such work, to quote the old formula, must be the product of “emotion remembered in tranquillity.”

Not long ago Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, the keenest of the younger critics, was pointing out to us the value of a usable past. Such a usable past has clearly failed us in this emergency, but the war is rapidly creating a new one for us, if we have the vision to make use of it. During the past four years English writers have had such a past to fall back upon, when their minds failed before the stupendous reality of the present, and so they have come off better than we on the whole. It was such a usable past, to point out the most signal instance of it, that inspired Rupert Brooke’s last sonnets, which will always stand as the perfect relation of a noble past to an unknowable present.