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* 1 OLIVER-WENDELL-HOU I LIBRARY This collection covers the period follow¬ ing the cease-fire order of World War 11, in which the world desperately tried to adjust itself properly to the “peace.” It is particularly significant this year be¬ cause the young men and women who had been too busy fighting for four years are now back at their typewriters. The short story reflects more immediately than any other literary form their chang¬ ing mood and determination. This year Hudson Strode, Helen Hull, and James Gray served as judges to pick the winners of the annual O. Henry Me¬ morial Award. First prize went to John Goss for Bird Song; second prize to Margaret Shedd for The Innocent By¬ stander, and third prize to Victor Ull- man for Sometimes You Break Even. A special prize for a first published short story was awarded to Gord Meyer, Jr., for Waves of Darkness. As in previous years, there is a fine introduction by Mr. Brickell, biographi¬ cal sketches of the authors whose works are included in the 1946 volume, a list of the magazines Mr. Brickell consulted in choosing the twenty-two stories in¬ cluded, and a list of the stories previ¬ ously awarded prizes. 5*-, ■ '-'. a 1 t" - '•'■> I • '‘'0/ ‘V -'•■ , ■' l\ ' '■-' - ’ Vji^.r : it/-;-■•- » ' ■^’ ■■ ( 1“ v:v '{''■■■ '' iiT' ' ' ■ ' ■ ? v;iy '' < 1 ’ ■;. ■ ^ n*. .-s .^-.-j J fc - r • ;■ > % ^ •: >5 , .j ^ • -j?? •-,» O. HENRY MEMORIAL AWARD PRIZE STORIES OF 1946 1 \ s ' '*♦ . i ■>: I O. HENRY MEMORIAL AWARD PRIZE STORIES OF 1946 SELECTED AND EDITED BY HERSCHEL BRICKELL ASSISTED BY MURIEL FULLER DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. Garden City 1946 New York ”? 33 COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. FIRST edition CONTENTS=*= ^ Introduction. By Herschel Bric\ell.vii Bird Song. By John Mayo Goss. t The Innocent Bystander. By Margaret Shedd.iS v/ Sometimes You Break Even. By Victor Ullman .... 31 Waves of Darkness. By Cord Meyer, Jr.4S The Imaginary Jew. By John Berryman.65 Winter Night. By Kay Boyle.74 Request for Sherwood Anderson. By Vran\ Broo\houser . 85 ^ Sex Education. By Dorothy Canfield.9^ Miriam. By Truman Capote. ^ I Forgot Where I Was. By Elizabeth Enright.115 What We Have Missed. By Elizabeth Hardwic\ . .123 The Heroine. By Patricia Highsmith.i33 Innocents. By M. P. Plutchins . ..^49' Breathe upon These Slain. By Meridel Ee Sueur .... 177 The Guide. By Andrew Lytle.^95 Not Very Close. By Dorothy McCleary.218 y Black Secret. By Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.226 *After the prize storiesj the order is alphabetical by author. V VI Contents The Beggar Boy. By David S. Savler.233 Act of Faith. By Irwin Shaw.242 The Empty Sky. By Benedict Thielen.259 A Sketching Trip. By Eudora Welty ..272 The Blackboard. By fessamyn West . ... 294 Biographical Notes.3°4 Appendix.3^5 INTRODUCTION This is the twenty-eighth annual collection of the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories. Established in 1919 by the Society of Arts and Sciences of New York City as a fitting memorial to William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), known to the world as O. Henry, the anthology undertakes to present each year a score or more of stories by American writers, published in American maga¬ zines, which are considered to be representative of the best in current short fiction. The present collection contains twenty-two stories, more than half of them by authors hitherto not represented. These stories appeared between May 1945 and April 1946, inclusive. They were winnowed from several hundred that were scanned or read, and they represent not only a careful and conscientious searching of all the magazines in the country that publish fiction, but also long and prayerful examination and re-examination before the final judgment. That the stories in this volume, and in the collection generally, should come year after year from a relatively narrow range of publi¬ cations is no indication of any prejudice against magazines of mass circulation. In these, the perfectly natural tendency is to reduce fiction to formulae that have stood the test of the ages. It is indeed remarkable that the public appetite for romance should remain so obviously insatiable, since Boy Gets Girl is as sure-fire today as when the first caveman made effective use of his club for purposes more pleasant than war or the hunt. We may be sure, if it gives us any comfort, that not even the arrival of the atom bomb or the dawn vii X Introduction “The Beggar Boy.” She said, however, that she might have been influenced in her choice by “an allergy to stories of insanity.” The editor’s wife, Norma Long Brickell, one of the small group of people who read all the stories before publication, placed the Goss story first from the very beginning. Of “Bird Song” Mr. Gray wrote: “This story is particularly good because it is admirably created from the standpoint pf structure and it, too, allows a handful of very real people to emerge out of the shadows of a tragic half-world of failure. I have not in a long time read a story of quiet despair that seemed to me so dismaying. There is a piercing sort of irony to the climax in which the central figure, having found that he simply cannot cope with the untidy realities of his world, settles cozily down into the protection of madness. It isn’t belabored; the irony isn’t overdone or insisted upon senti¬ mentally. The circumstances of inescapable tragedy are simply set before one with complete persuasiveness.” These are unusually shrewd remarks. Miss Hull’s comment on the story was: “Beresford’s struggle to reach a degree of sanity which will permit him to rejoin his Denise, his hours with Denise, the vaguely ominous suggestion of her life, and Beresford’s pitiful flight back into the shelter of the institution, leave a vivid impression of the tragedy in mental disorder.” Mr. Strode, in placing Miss Shedd’s story at the top of his list, a judgment that weighed heavily in the final decision, wrote of it and of the Goss story: “These two stories are short stories in the best sense of the generally accepted definition of a short story. They are peculiarly authentic in atmosphere, though Miss Shedd’s is less specific in detail than Mr. Goss’s, and they have an inevitability that grips the reader. The authors tell their stories of human beings caught in distressing situations with restrained excitement and compassion. Miss Shedd presents a tragic situation that grows out of a locality, from outside agencies; and her inspired title points her theme. The poignancy of Mr. Goss’s story comes from defects within the leading characters themselves. The endings of my three favorite stories” [Cord Meyer’s “Waves of Darkness” is the third] “are par¬ ticularly effective in that they carry the narrative’s emotion and import beyond the last line—as, in a different way, does the dra¬ matic fall of the curtain in Ibsen’s Ghosts.’* Introduction XI Mr. Strode has a good point here, although he need not have confined himself to a single example of how any good work of art extends its area of impact far beyond the mould into which it is poured. Indeed, one of the best tests of the value of a short story is what it does in the way of breaking its bonds and becoming much larger in import than the form would seem to permit. All great pictures have infinite horizons and cannot be confined in their frames any more than great, or even good, music can be confined in whatever form its composer may have chosen, with its rigid mathematical requirements. The editor is well aware that he is for¬ ever seeking the story with overtones that remain in the mind and heart sometimes after the story itself has been buried and forgotten in the clutter of memories that fill the human brain. Neither Mr. Gray nor Miss Hull mentioned the Shedd story in ^eir reports. Miss Fuller referred to it as “effective,” without further comment. The award of third prize to Mr. Ullman was based principally upon the opinions of Mr. Gray and Miss Hull. Mr. Gray wrote: “ ‘Sometimes You Break Even’ had been my candidate for third place until I read ‘Bird Song.’ The characters are well presented and interesting, but the author involves them in a series of physical crises which suggest a film by Cecil B. DeMille rather than any of the more reticent forms of art.” Miss Hull said: “The Ullman story is my choice for second prize, because of the vivid reality with which Mr. Ullman creates scene and atmosphere, because of the vitality in the characterization o£ Hartnung, and because of the ironic implications in the issue of the story.” Mr. Strode did not mention this story, but Miss Fuller thought it deserved second prize, saying: “It sweeps you along in the hurricane with the hospital corpsman, as he struggles with the nurses for the lives of the men. I was in that hospital, living those hours with the characters.” This was also one of Mrs. Brickell’s best-liked stories and she thought it a tossup as between it and the Shedd piece. The Shedd story is more skillful in technique than the Ullman and has greater imaginative quality as well, although this decision had to be more arbitrary than some of the others and might have been almost as easily defended if it had been reversed.

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