The Best Short Stories of 1915 | Page 5

between book covers. It is from this final short
list that the stories reprinted in this volume have been selected.
It has been a point of honor with me not to republish an English story
or a short story whose immediate publication in book form elsewhere

seems likely. I have also made it a rule not to include more than one
story by an individual author in the volume. The general and particular
results of my study will be found explained and carefully detailed in the
supplementary part of the volume. It only remains now to point out
certain passing characteristics of the year for the sake of chronological
completeness.
I suppose there can be no doubt that "Zelig" is by all odds the most
nobly conceived and finely wrought story of the year. It is a peculiar
satisfaction to find again this year, as in 1914, that the best story is the
work of an unknown author. Mr. Rosenblatt's story is in my opinion
even more satisfying as a report of life than Mr. Conrad Richter's
"Brothers of No Kin," which I felt to be the best story published during
1914. The American public is indebted to Professor Albert Frederick
Wilson, of the New York University School of Journalism for the
discovery and encouragement of Mr. Rosenblatt's literary genius.
Professor Wilson's service to American literature in this matter should
be adequately acknowledged.
The Bellman, in which "Zelig" appeared, is remarkable for the
brilliance and power of its fiction. My averages this year show clearly
that its percentage of distinctive stories is nearly double that of the
American weekly which most nearly approaches it. The quality of the
Bellman's poetry is a matter of national knowledge. It is fully equalled
by the Bellman's fiction, which renders it one of the three or four
American periodicals necessary to every student of our spiritual
history.
One new periodical and one new short story writer claim unique
attention this year for their recent achievement and abundant future
promise. A year ago a slender little monthly magazine entitled the
Midland was first issued in Iowa City. It attracted very little attention,
and in the course of the year published but ten short stories. It has been
my pleasure and wonder to find in these ten stories the most vital
interpretation in fiction of our national life that many years have been
able to show. Since the most brilliant days of the New England men of
letters, no such group of writers has defined its position with such

assurance and modesty.
One new short story writer has appeared this year whose five published
stories open a new field to fiction and have a human richness of feeling
and imagination rare in our oversophisticated literature. I refer to the
fables of Seumas O'Brien. At first one is struck with their utter absence
of form, and then one realizes that this is a conscious art that wanders
truant over life and imagination. In Seumas O'Brien I believe that
America has found a new humorist of popular sympathies, a rare
observer and philosopher whose very absurdities have a persuasive
philosophy of their own.
The two established writers whose sustained excellence this year is
most impressive are Katharine Fullerton Gerould and Wilbur Daniel
Steele. Lincoln Colcord's two stories show qualities of artistic
conscience reënforcing an imaginative substance so real that another
year or two should suffice for him to take his place with the leaders of
American fiction. I must affirm once more the genuine literary art of
Fannie Hurst. The absolute fidelity of her dialogue to life and its
revealing spirit, not despite, but rather because of the vulgarities she
accepts, seem to me to assure her permanence in her best work.
A rare literary art, not dissimilar in fundamentals, and quite as
marvellously documented, is revealed by Rupert Hughes in his series of
stories in the Metropolitan Magazine this year. In "Michaeleen!
Michaelawn!" he has succeeded greatly. It is a story which it will be
difficult for Americans to forget.
What must have begun as a doubtful experiment and been continued
only because it was a triumphantly demonstrated success has been the
serial publication for the great average American public of my selection
of the best twenty-one stories published in 1914. The Illustrated
Sunday Magazine has evidently justified its daring, and the bold
pioneering of its editor, Mr. Hiram M. Greene, to judge from the host
of letters I have received from readers who have not read the best
magazines in the past because, as many of them state, they feared that
they were too "high-brow," but who have been convinced, by the
introduction to the best contemporary fiction afforded them weekly in

the supplement to their Sunday newspaper, that such periodicals as
Harper's Magazine and Scribner's Magazine have many