Edward J. O'Brien's Prize Stories of the ‘National Soul’

kasia boddy

It is hard for us today to imagine the scale of short fiction production and consumption in the United States a hundred years ago. Since at least the 1950s and 1960s, when magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post folded, talk of the short story has become couched in nostalgia. 'The sad thing about writing short stories', complained Norman Mailer in 1981, 'is that you can't. I don't think there are more than four or five writers of short stories in this country who actually survive that way year after year.' 1 In 2000, Joyce Carol Oates declared the genre an 'endangered species', while last year Mary Gaitskill introduced an anthology of 'new voices' by declaring the short story not 'exactly dead' but 'pallid and ill from neglect'. 2 In 1900, however, the market for short fiction seemed insatiable. If, as Frank Norris noted, 'the novelist may look down upon the mere writer of short stories, or may even look down upon himself in the same capacity', that object of contempt was nonetheless 'the man who has the money'. 3 The money didn't come from collections -books of stories didn't sell, even in 1900 -but from a piece's initial publication in one of the many magazines that flourished at the time. Publishers knew that magazines, and even newspapers, sold because of their stories and they targeted the readership their advertisers required with variations on reliable formulae: romance, crime, 'local colour', the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches tale, and the story with a 'snapper' or a 'semi-ironic, semi-sentimental twist', made famous by O. Henry in the the Smart Set. 4 The draw of the story was such -and so carefully calculated -that James T. Farrell derided it as a 'kind of literary pimp' for advertisers. 5 Short stories, said Dorothy Parker, were just there to separate 'the Ivory Soup advertisements from the pages devoted to Campbell's soups'. 6 But however eagerly readers sought out stories, they seldom thought them worth keeping to reread. 'The life of a short story, no matter what its quality, was a month.' 7 Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1890 to 1895, was one of the first to offer the not very flattering characterisation of short story consumption that was to become commonplace throughout the twentieth century: 'a race of modern readers like ours . . . educated upon the scraps into which