O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 | Page 2

Name on Peachtree (_Live Stories_, Feb.). Ferber, Edna, You've Got to Be Selfish (_McClure's_, April). Fitzgerald, Scott, The Camel's Back (_Saturday Evening Post_, Apr. 24); The Cut-Glass Bowl (_Scribner's_, May); The Off-Shore Pirate (_Saturday Evening Post_, May 29). Forbes, Esther, Break-Neck Hill (_Grinnell Review_, September). Gilpatric, Guy, Black Art and Ambrose (_Collier's_, 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 Iba?ez, 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