Two characteristics of stories published in 1921 reveal editorial policies that cannot but be harmful to the quality of this art.  These ear-marks are complementary and, yet, paradoxically antipodal.  In order to draw out the torso and tail of a story through Procrustean lengths of advertising pages, some editors place, or seem to place, a premium upon length.  The writer, with an eye to acceptance by these editors, consciously or unconsciously pads his matter, giving a semblance of substance where substance is not.  Many stories fall below first rank in the opinion of the Committee through failure to achieve by artistic economy the desired end.  The comment “Overwritten” appeared again and again on the margins of such stories.  The reverse of this policy, as practised by other editors, is that of chopping the tail or, worse, of cutting out sections from the body of the narrative, then roughly piecing together the parts to fit a smaller space determined by some expediency.  Under the observation of the Committee have fallen a number of stories patently cut for space accommodation.  Too free use of editorial blue pencil and scissors has furnished occasion for protest among authors and for comment by the press.  For example, in The Literary Review of The New York Post, September 3, the leading article remarks, after granting it is a rare script that cannot be improved by good editing, and after making allowance for the physical law of limitation by space:  “Surgery, however, must not become decapitation or such a trimming of long ears and projecting toes as savage tribes practise.  It seems very probable that by ruthless reshaping and hampering specifications in our magazines, stories and articles have been seriously affected.”  Further, “the passion for editorial cutting” is graphically illustrated in The Authors’ League Bulletin for December (page 8) by a mutilation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Although, by the terms of the Memorial, the Committee were at liberty to consider only stories by American authors, they could not but observe the increasing number of races represented through authorship.  Some of the following names will be recognized from preceding years, some of them are new:  Blasco Ibanez, W. Somerset Maugham, May Sinclair, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, Mary Butts, Frank Swinnerton, Georges Clemenceau, Johan Bojer, H. Soederberg, Seumas Macmanus, R. Sabatini, Demetra Vaka, Achmed Abdullah, Rabindranath Tagore, A. Remizov, Konrad Bercovici, Anzia Yezierska, and—­daughter of an English mother and Italian father who met in China, she herself having been born in San Francisco—­Adriana Spadoni.  Nor do these represent all the nations whose sons and daughters practise the one indigenous American art on its native soil.  Let the list stand, without completion, sufficient to the point.