The following essay discusses Whit Burnett and his first wife, Martha Foley.

Whit Burnett and Martha Foley founded Story, a magazine devoted solely to the short story, in Vienna in 1931. Almost from the beginning Story was recognized by Edward J. O'Brien, an editor of short-story anthologies, as a magazine of distinction. In the introduction to his Best Short Stories of 1932, he wrote that Story "is now the most distinguished short story magazine in the world." O'Brien published four stories from the magazine in that 1932 anthology.

Martha Foley, the daughter of Walter and Margaret Millicent McCarthy Foley, was born in Boston in 1897. She attended the Boston Girls' Latin School from 1909 to 1915. Although her father, a doctor, had wanted her to be a teacher like her mother, she longed to be a writer. Her first short story was published in the school magazine, the Jabberwock, when she was eleven. She...