The Best Short Stories of 1920 | Page 3

his feeling wherever he finds it.
It has been my experience that the reader is likely to find this warmly
sympathetic interpretation of human nature, its pleasures and its

sorrows, its humor and its tragedy, most often in the American
magazines that talk least about their own merit. We are all familiar with
the sort of magazine that contents itself with saying day in and day out
ceaselessly and noisily: "The Planet Magazine is the greatest magazine
in the universe. The greatest literary artists and the world's greatest
illustrators contribute to our pages." And it stops there. It has repeated
this claim so often that it has come to believe it. Such a magazine is the
great literary ostrich. It hides by burying its eyes in the sand.
It is an axiom of human nature that the greatest men do not find it
necessary or possible to talk about their own greatness. They are so
busy that they have never had much time to think about it. And so it is
with the best magazines, and with the best short stories. The man who
wrote what I regard as the best short story published in 1915 was the
most surprised man in Brooklyn when I told him so.
The truth of the matter is that we are changing very rapidly, and that a
new national sense in literature is accompanying that change. There
was a time, and in fact it is only now drawing to a close, when the short
story was exploited by interested moneymakers who made such a loud
noise that you could hear nothing else without great difficulty. The
most successful of these noisemakers are still shouting, but their heart
is in it no longer. The editor of one of the largest magazines in the
country said to me not long ago that he found the greatest difficulty
now in procuring short stories by writers for whom his magazine had
trained the public to clamor. The immediate reason which he ascribed
for this state of affairs was that the commercial rewards offered to these
writers by the moving picture companies were so great, and the
difference in time and labor between writing scenarios and developing
finished stories was so marked, that authors were choosing the more
attractive method of earning money. The excessive commercialisation
of literature in the past decade is now turned against the very
magazines which fostered it. The magazines which bought and sold
fiction like soap are beginning to repent of it all. They have killed the
goose that laid the golden eggs.
This fight for sincerity in the short story is a fight that is worth making.

It is at the heart of all that for which I am striving. The quiet sincere
man who has something to tell you should not be talked down by the
noisemakers. He should have his hearing. He is real. And we need him.
That is why I have set myself the annual task of reading so many short
stories. I am looking for the man and woman with something to
say,--who cares very much indeed about how he says it. I am looking
for the man and woman with some sort of a dream, the man or woman
who sees just a little bit more in the pedlar he passes on the street than
you or I do, and who wishes to devote his life to telling us about it. I
want to be told my own story too, so that I can see myself as other
people see me. And I want to feel that the storyteller who talks to me
about these things is as much in earnest as a sincere clergyman, an
unselfish physician, or an idealistic lawyer. I want to feel that he
belongs to a profession that is a sort of priesthood, and not that he is
holding down a job or running a bucket shop.
I have found this writer with a message in almost every magazine I
have studied during the year. He is just as much in earnest in Collier's
Weekly as he is in Scribner's Magazine. I do not find him often, but he
is there somewhere. And he is the only man for whom it is worth our
while to watch. I feel that it is none of my business whether I like and
agree with what he has to say or not. All that I am looking for is to see
whether he means what he says and makes it as real as he can to me. I
accept his substance at his own valuation, but I want to know what he
makes of it.
Each race that forms part of the substance in our great melting pot is
bringing the richest of its traditions to add