[Footnote 3:  Listed alphabetically by authors.]

[Footnote 4:  A member of the Committee of Award, this author refused as a matter of course to allow consideration of her stories for republication here or for the prizes.  But the other members insist upon their being listed, and upon mention of “Red Gulls” as one of the best stories of 1920.]

[Footnote 5:  Reprinted as by Frances Noyes Hart.]

From this list were selected seventeen stories which, in the judgment of the Committee, rank highest and which, therefore, are reprinted in this volume.

Since, as will be recalled from the conditions of the award, only American authors were considered, certain familiar foreign names are conspicuously absent.  Achmed Abdullah, Stacy Aumonier, F. Britten Austin, Phyllis Bottome, Thomas Burke, Coningsby Dawson, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, Lord Dunsany, John Galsworthy, Perceval Gibbon, Blasco Ibanez, Maurice Level, A. Neil Lyons, Seumas MacManus, Leonard Merrick, Maria Moravsky, Alfred Noyes, May Sinclair and Hugh Walpole all illustrate recovery from the world war.  But with their stories the Committee had nothing to do.  The Committee cannot forbear mention, however, of “Under the Tulips” (Detective Stories, February 10), one of the two best horror specimens of the year.  It is by an Englishwoman, May Edginton.

Half a dozen names from the foreign list just given are synonymous with the best fiction of the period.  Yet the short story as practised in its native home continues to excel the short story written in other lands.  The English, the Russian, the French, it is being contended in certain quarters, write better literature.  They do not, therefore, write better stories.  If literature is of a magnificent depth and intricate subtlety in a measure proportionate to its reflection of the vast complexity of a nation that has existed as such for centuries, conceivably it will be facile and clever in a measure proportionate to its reflection of the spirit of the commonwealth which in a few hundred years has acquired a place with age-old empires.

The American short-story is “simple, economical, and brilliantly effective,” H.L.  Mencken admits.[6] “Yet the same hollowness that marks the American novel,” he continues, “also marks the short story.”  And of “many current makers of magazine short stories,” he asseverates, “such stuff has no imaginable relation to life as men live it in the world.”  He further comments, “the native author of any genuine force and originality is almost invariably found to be under strong foreign influences, either English or Continental.”

With due regard for the justice of this slant—­that of a student of Shaw, Ibsen, and Nietzsche—­we believe that the best stories written in America to-day reflect life, even life that is sordid and dreary or only commonplace.  In the New York Evening Post[7] the present writer observed: 

“A backward glance over the short stories of the preceding twelve months discovers two facts.  There are many of them, approximately between fifteen hundred and two thousand; there are, comparatively, few of merit.”