The Best Short Stories of 1915 And the Yearbook of the American Short Story

by Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien (editor)

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Genres: Short Stories, Anthologies, Literary Fiction

466 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1916

About the author

Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien (1890-1941) was an American author, poet, editor and anthologist. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Boston College and Harvard University. He was noted for compiling and editing an annual collection of The Best Short Stories by American authors at the beginning of the twentieth-century, and also a series of The Best Short Stories by British authors. They proved to be highly influential and popular. He was also a noted author, his works including White Fountains (1917) and The Forgotten Threshold (1918).

Reviews

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting reading what constituted the “best of” American short stories in and around 1915—at least, according to Edward J. O’Brien, who chose them all. At the time he chose them, World War I had been going on for about a year and a half. The United States wouldn’t join in until 1917, but, despite President Wilson promising to keep us out of it, there seems to be an assumption by those writers who dealt with the issue that he would fail. There are many stories about war here, from some future world war where an opera singer sings both sides into giving up, to past wars such as the American Civil War and the very recent (1914) American occupation of Vera Cruz (which may be why nobody believed Wilson would keep us out of war in Europe).

War wasn’t the only thing on people’s minds, though. Many states had enacted alcohol prohibition by 1914, and if there’s one thing you don’t want to take away from a writer, it’s his alcohol.

I remember one night when we sat up until three discussing the philosophy of prohibition over three bottles of port. I wonder how many other men have done the same thing!

Probably quite a few more after 1920.

It’s easy enough to tell from the verbiage that these are older stories. There are words we just don’t use anymore, stuck among phrasings that are old-fashioned today.

The tensity written on their faces, eager yet awed, brought back to James Thorold another time when men and women had stood within a Chicago railway terminal waiting for a funeral cortège, the time when Illinois waited in sorrow to take Abraham Lincoln, dead, to her heart.

This may be the first time I’ve seen tensity outside of a dictionary.

But among them are some definitely lyrical phrasings as well:

She was a good vessel, a sound vessel, even a handsome vessel, in her blunt-bowed, coastwise way. She sailed under four lowers across as blue and glittering a sea as I have ever known, and there was not a point in her sailing that one could lay a finger upon as wrong. And yet, passing that schooner at two miles, one knew, somehow, that no hand was on her wheel. Sometimes I can imagine a vessel, stricken like that, moving over the empty spaces of the sea, carrying it off quite well were it not for that indefinable suggestion of a stagger; and I can think of all those ocean gods, in whom no landsman will ever believe, looking at one another and tapping their foreheads with just the shadow of a smile.

[Ronald Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of twenty short stories selected from over twenty-two hundred pieces published in American magazines in 1914 and 1915. Nearly all of those included dealt with contemporary topics and together they portrayed a unique moment in history. In a couple of them, characters were still coping with the effects of the American Civil War – which led to my surprised realization that that war was as recent in 1915 as the Vietnam War is to us now. And then four or five of them focused on the war then underway in Europe. By that time the disruption of life in Europe and the horrors of trench warfare were already well known, but it also seemed that that war's eventual magnitude, the American involvement, and the Russian revolution were unanticipated.

My favorites were: “The Wake” by Donn Byrne; “The Citizen” by James Francis Dwyer; “Whose Dog--?” by Frances Gregg; “Heart of Youth” by Walter J. Muilenburg; “The Waiting Years” by Katharine Metcalf Roof; and “The Survivors” by Elsie Singmaster.

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Water-Hole by Maxwell Struthers Burt
The Wake by Donn Byrne
Chautonville by Will Lexington Comfort
La Dernière Mobilisation by W.A. Dwiggins
The Citizen by James Francis Dwyer
Whose Dog-? by Frances Gregg
Life by Ben Hecht
T.B. by Fannie Hurst
Mr. Eberdeen’s House by Arthur Johnson
Vengeance is Mine by Virgil Jordan
The Weaver who Clad the Summer by Harris Merton Lyon
Heart of Youth by Walter J. Muilenbirg
The End of the Path by Newbold Noyes
The Whale and the Grasshopper by Seumas O’Brien
In Berlin by Mary Boyle O’Reilly
The Waiting Years by Katherine Metcalf Roof
Zelig by Benjamin Rosenblatt
The Survivors, a Memorial Day story by Elsie Singmaster
The Yellow Cat by Wilbur Daniel Steele
The Bounty-Jumper by Mary Synon

[Cassandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection; I like these anthologies from the past, that show a snapshot of time, what an editor then thought was good work, and also what the writers were concerned with. This was a good mix, I think; stories about the war in Europe (WWI), stories about the aftermath of the Civil War, stories about immigrants -- I do not know the editor, but I got the sense that he was concerned with social realism, from the stories he chose, although some of them were quite fantastical, too.

My favourites: "The Wake" by Donn Byrne (undercutting some Irish stereotypes), "Chautonville" by Will Levington Comfort (sheer fantasy about the Eastern front, very bittersweet), "Vengeance is Mine" by Virgin Jordan (another about the war, with a touch of insight about what might happen when Germany was defeated), "The Whale and the Grasshopper" by Seumus O'Brien (satirical Irish nonsense which to my surprise made me laugh a great deal), "Zelig" by Benjamin Rosenblatt (listed as the best story of the year by the editor, and yes, I see why).

They were all at least competent, and some were well-crafted but simply not the sort of work I really admire. I think, looking back, that the ones about WWI were the most interesting to me because of the historical perspective; "Chautonville" reminded me of Dorothy Whipple's _The Priory_ in its imagining a happy ending that then did not come -- although Levington Comfort twists the knife inside the story, whereas Whipple plays it straight. But both his story and Jordan's show a sense of foresight about the costs of the war which pleases me. Foresight does not good fiction make, of course.

What astonished me most about the volume was the amount in which the Civil War was still in the minds of those who wrote. Of course, there were some still alive who had fought in it, and many alive whose parents or grandparents had, but for me there is such an enormous (artificial, of course) disconnect between the Civil War and WWI -- between Victorianism and Modernism -- that it was an excellent reminder of the continuity of historical experience, that authors in 1915 would be writing about people dealing with their memories of the war (Mary Synon's "The Bounty Jumper") and the like.

I plan to acquire the 1916 volume from the library & read it as well.

[Ben Riddle · Rating 3 out of 5]

5/5 for "The Weaver Who Clad the Summer"
The rest was forgettable.

[Library Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting stories. :)

[Rory · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually hold here a first edition copy of The Best Short Stories of 1915 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story from 1916, originally published by Small, Maynard & Company, checked out from the Ventura College Library (or the Evelyn and Howard Boroughs Library as is well known to people like me, and to all students who go there who happen to look up as they enter), for which I'm grateful that they keep books like this in its stacks, in circulation.