The Best Short Stories of 1921 | Page 2

GOOD FACE. By Frank Luther Mott. 300
(From The Midland)
MASTER OF FALLEN YEARS. By Vincent O'Sullivan. 321 (From
The Smart Set)
THE SHAME DANCE. By Wilbur Daniel Steele. 337 (From Harper's
Magazine)
KINDRED. By Harriet Maxon Thayer. 362 (From The Midland)
SHELBY. By Charles Hanson Towne. 386 (From The Smart Set)
THE WALLOW OF THE SEA. By Mary Heaton Vorse. 401 (From
Harper's Magazine)
THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY,
OCTOBER, 1920, TO SEPTEMBER, 1921 419
Addresses of American and English Magazines Publishing Short
Stories. 421
The Biographical Roll of Honor of American Short Stories. 424
The Roll of Honor of Foreign Short Stories in American Magazines.
428

The Best Books of Short Stories: A Critical Summary. 430
Volumes of Short Stories Published in the United States: An Index. 437
Volumes of Short Stories Published in England and Ireland Only. 440
Volumes of Short Stories Published in France. 442
Articles on the Short Story: An Index. 443
Index of Short Stories in Books. 457
I. American Authors. 458
II. English and Irish Authors. 461
III. Translations. 463
Magazine Averages. 466
Index of Short Stories Published in American Magazines. 469
I. American Authors. 471
II. English and Irish Authors. 500
III. Translations. 505

INTRODUCTION
I was talking the other day to Alfred Coppard, who has steered more
successfully than most English story writers away from the Scylla and
Charybdis of the modern artist. He told me that he had been reading
several new novels and volumes of short stories by contemporary
American writers with that awakened interest in the civilization we are
framing which is so noticeable among English writers during the past
three years. He asked me a remarkable question, and the answer which
I gave him suggested certain contrasts which seemed to me of basic

importance for us all. He said: "I have been reading books by
Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank and Ben Hecht and Konrad
Bercovici and Joseph Hergesheimer, and I can see that they are
important books, but I feel that the essential point to which all this
newly awakened literary consciousness is tending has somehow subtly
eluded me. American and English writers both use the same language,
and so do Scotch and Irish writers, but I am not puzzled when I read
Scotch and Irish books as I am when I read these new American books.
Why is it?"
I had to think for a moment, and then the obvious answer occurred to
me. I told him that I thought the reason for his moderate bewilderment
was due to the fact that the Englishman or the Scotchman or the
Irishman living at home was writing out of a background of racial
memory and established tradition which was very much all of one piece,
and that all such an artist's unspoken implications and subtleties could
be easily taken for granted by his readers, and more or less thoroughly
understood, because they were elements in harmony with a tolerably
fixed and ordered world.
I added that this was more or less true of the American writer up to a
date roughly coinciding with that of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892.
During the thirty years more or less which have elapsed since that date,
there has been an ever widening seething maelstrom of cross currents
thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the
contributory elements brought to a new potential American culture by
the dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of many races.
My suggestion to Mr. Coppard was that gradually the Anglo-Saxon, to
take the most readily understandable instance, was beginning to absorb
large tracts of many other racial fields of memory, and to share the
experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian, of
Polish and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic,
and that all these widening tracts of remembered racial experience
interacting upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our
nervous, keen, and eager industrial civilization had set up a new chaos
in many creative minds. I said that Mr. Anderson and the others, half

consciously and half unconsciously, were trying to create worlds out of
each separate chaos, living dangerously, as Nietzsche advised, and
fusing their conceptions at a certain calculated temperature in artistic
crucibles of their own devising.
Mr. Coppard said that he quite saw that, but added that the particular
meaning in each case more or less escaped him. And then I ventured to
suggest that these meanings were more important for Americans at the
present stage than for Europeans, because American minds would grasp
readily at suggestions that harmonized with their own spiritual pasts,
and seize instinctive relations and congruities which had previously
escaped them in their experience, and so begin to formulate from these
books new intuitive laws. I suggested,