The Best Short Stories of 1915 | Page 2

their efforts in making this year-book of
American fiction possible and more complete:
Mr. A.A. Boyden, Mr. Bruce Barton, Mr. Henry A. Bellows, Professor
Albert Frederick Wilson, Mr. Barry Benefield, Mr. Douglas Z. Doty,
Mr. Karl Edwin Harriman, Mr. Edward Frank Allen, Mr. Carl Hovey,
Miss Sonya Levien, Mr. William Griffith, Mr. Arthur T. Vance, Mr.
Mitchell Kennerley, Mr. H.M. Greene, Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. J.B.
Carrington, Mr. Hayden Carruth, Mr. Frederic A. Duneka, Mr. Henry J.
Forman, Mr. Gilman Hall, Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, Miss Margaret
Anderson, Mr. Charles Edison, Mr. Guido Bruno, Mr. William Marion
Reedy, Mr. John T. Frederick, Mr. Burton Kline, Miss Dorothea
Lawrance Mann, Miss Katharine Butler, Mr. Thomas H. Uzzell, Mr.
Virgil Jordan, Mrs. Elsie Singmaster Lewars, Mr. Alfred A. Knopf,
Miss Hilda Baker, Mr. William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mr. Francis J.
Hannigan, in charge of the Periodical Department of the Boston Public
Library. To Mr. Hannigan my special gratitude is due. My ability to
find certain back numbers of periodicals which the publishers were

unable to supply is due to his personal helpfulness and unsparing pains.
In fact, his assistance at certain times almost amounted to collaboration.
I shall be grateful to my readers for corrections and particularly for
suggestions leading to the wider usefulness of this annual volume. In
particular, I shall welcome the receipt from authors and publishers, of
stories published during 1916 which have qualities of distinction, and
yet are not printed in periodicals falling under my regular notice. For
such assistance I shall make due and grateful acknowledgment in next
year's annual.
If I have been guilty of any omissions in these acknowledgments, it is
quite unintentional, and I trust that I shall be absolved for my good
intentions.
E.J.O.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. By the Editor
THE WATER-HOLE. By Maxwell Struthers Burt (From Scribner's
Magazine)
THE WAKE. By Donn Byrne (From Harper's Magazine)
CHAUTONVILLE. By Will Levington Comfort (From The Masses)
LA DERNIÈRE MOBILISATION. By W.A. Dwiggins (From The
Fabulist)
THE CITIZEN. By James Francis Dwyer (From Collier's Weekly)
WHOSE DOG--? By Frances Gregg (From The Forum)
LIFE. By Ben Hecht (From The Little Review)

T.B. By Fannie Hurst (From The Saturday Evening Post)
MR. EBERDEEN'S HOUSE. By Arthur Johnson (From The Century)
VENGEANCE IS MINE. By Virgil Jordan (From Everybody's
Magazine)
THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER. By Harris Merton
Lyon (From The Illustrated Sunday Magazine)
HEART OF YOUTH. By Walter J. Muilenburg (From The Midland)
THE END OF THE PATH. By Newbold Noyes (From Every Week)
THE WHALE AND THE GRASSHOPPER. By Seumas O'Brien
(From The Illustrated Sunday Magazine)
IN BERLIN. By Mary Boyle O'Reilly (From The Boston Daily
Advertiser)
THE WAITING YEARS. By Katharine Metcalf Roof (From The
Century Magazine)
ZELIG. By Benjamin Rosenblatt (From The Bellman)
THE SURVIVORS. By Elsie Singmaster (From The Outlook)
THE YELLOW CAT. By Wilbur Daniel Steele (From Harper's
Magazine)
THE BOUNTY-JUMPER. By Mary Synon (From Scribner's
Magazine)
THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY FOR 1914
AND 1915
THE ROLL OF HONOR FOR 1914
THE ROLL OF HONOR FOR 1915

MAGAZINE AVERAGES FOR 1915
INDEX OF SHORT STORIES FOR 1914 AND 1915

INTRODUCTION
In reaffirming the significant position of the American short story as
compared with the English short story, I am more impressed than ever
with the leadership maintained by American artists in this literary form.
Mr. James Stephens has been criticising us for our curiously negative
achievement in novel writing. He has compared the American novelist
with the English novelist and found him wanting. He is compelled to
deny literary distinction to the American novel, and he makes a
sweeping indictment of American fiction in consequence. But does he
know the American short story?
If you turn to the English magazines, you will find a certain form of
conte of narrow range developed to a point of high literary merit in
such a paper as the Nation or the New Statesman. But if you look for
short stories in the literary periodicals, you will not find them, and if
you turn to the popular English magazines, you will be amazed at the
cheap and meretricious quality of the English short story.
It would be idle to dispute about the origin of the short story, for
several literatures may claim its birth, but the American short story has
been developed as an art form to the point where it may fairly claim a
sustained superiority, as different in kind as in quality from the tale or
conte of other literatures.
It would be difficult to trace the reasons for its specially healthy growth
in a soil so idly fertilized as our American reading public, but it is less
difficult and far more valuable to trace its development and changing
standards from year to year as the field of its interest widens