Dorothy Parker's Picks for the Best American Short Stories of 1927

"The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway (1927, 5 pages)
"Another Wife"  by Sherwood Anderson (1927, 6 pages)
"The Short Story, Through a Couple of Ages" by Dorothy Parker (1927, 4 pages)

Today is day four of BBAW (Book Blogger  Appreciation Week).   Among the very most viewed posts on my blog (out of 750+) are those I have done on Dorothy Parker (1893 to 1967-USA).   All of  her stories are good and "Big Blond" is a work of genius (and also a warning!)   In addition to her stories and other literary works she wrote hundreds of short opinion articles for The New Yorker.   So in the spirit of community building and in honor of Dorothy Parker (who you know would have a great blog)  I am posting on what she says are the two best short stories of 1927.

"Another Wife"  by Sherwood Anderson

There is more to Sherwood Anderson (1876 to 1941-USA)  than his great collection of linked short stories, Winesburg, Ohio.   (I have included some background information on him in a prior post.)      "Another Wife" is told in the first person by a forty-eight year old physician.   It is kind of a strange story, nothing surprising about that.    We learn he is a widower.    His first wife and he came from poor families and this was part of their bond.   He talks quite a bit about how "plump" she was.   It is hard to see if he liked that or if it was a problem for him.  He has found a lady friend who comes to visit him at his house several times a month.   She is from a prosperous family and he talks over and over about how she is "plump" also and compares her size to that of his late wife.   As the story goes on a bit, we learn he is in fact married to this new woman.  At first I was confused but then I think he never mentioned it earlier as in his heart he does not really think she is his wife at all.   This is a very good story and Parker is to be commended for her excellent taste.

"The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961) is your all American iconic writer.    He won the Nobel Prize and wrote several of the most loved American novels like The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.   He is also very famous as a short story writer.   I think "The Killers" is one of his most famous and highest regarded short stories.  It sort of reminds me of something Quentin Taratino could make into a movie!    The story is set in a small restaurant.   The characters are the owner of the restaurant, the cook, two customers (the killers) and their intended victim.   It is almost all dialogue.  

As the story opens two men are in a diner.   They tell the owner they want to order the dinner special.   He tells them they are too early to get that and the men try to bait him into a conversation.   It is really well done and pretty scary in a way.   I will compress my summery a lot.   The two men have sawed off shot guns under their coats and the cook and the owner are very frightened.  The men tell them  they are at the diner as they know a man they are going to kill as a favor to a friend comes in everyday for the dinner.   I will leave the rest of the plot untold as it is the wonderful way Hemingway uses a minimum amount of dialogue to tell the story that makes it so great.   Of these two stories, I guess I would say this one is the best and for sure it is the most famous. 

You can read "Another Wife" Here 

You can read "The Killers" Here

You can read Parker's article Here

Mel u

Two Famous American Short Story writers double team the world's second best short story writer

"The Story of a Farm Girl" by Guy de Maupassant (1884, 9 pages)
"War" by Sherwood Anderson (1921, 6 pages)
"The Girl and the Habit" by O. Henry (1905, 5 pages)

Whose Story is Best?

Guy de Maupassant (1850 to 1893-France) is often listed, behind Anton Chekhov, as  the second greatest short story writer in the world.    He certainly was one of the most prolific with over 250  stories to his credit.     O Henry (1862 to 1910-USA) is famous for his "surprise ending" short stories like "The Ransom of Red Chief" and "The Magi".    He is very much an American writer and the leading annual American short story award is named for him.     Sherwood Anderson (1876 to 1941-USA) is most famous by far for his linked collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio.    Readers of O Henry like his work, they chuckle at the ones with good endings, where readers of Anderson love his work and are shocked by the sheer depth of his seemingly simple stories.   Today, just for fun, I will look at a story by each of these writers (not their best but I will explain why I picked them) and decide which one has the most merit and give some reasons.

"The Girl and the Habit" by O. Henry is third best, no way around this he is out of his class here.   "The Girl and the Habit" is set in a restaurant in the financial  district in New York City.    O Henry does a good job of describing the restaurant and its clients.   Most of the trade is at lunch and most of the customers are men who work in the area.   The cashier is totally beautiful.   All of the men flirt with her as they pay their checks.   She puts them off in a friendly bantering way that O Henry shows us.   How he does it is OK but could be better done.   One day a wealthy financier passes out in the restaurant.   When he wakes up the first thing he sees is the beautiful cashier.   He and his wife ending up adopting her and training her in all the social graces and she dreams of a lofty marriage.   They give her classes to refine her speech so she sounds like she is strictly upper class .  Then one day she is at a big charity even where earls and dukes  are in abundance.   She has been assigned to a both where she will sell items for charity.   An earl who she and her new parents want her to marry comes up to pay her for an item.   The girl does as a total flash back and speaks to him in her best "streets of Ne York" accent and when he asks her to dinner treats him just like she did the patrons in the restaurant.   As you read the story you are pretty much waiting for the surprise ending.   I found it a bit flat, the characters are one dimensional and the social satire kind of weak.   Not a horrible story but not close to "high art".     I read this story because it was one of the stories of the day at East of the Web:  Short Stories.

"The Story of a Farm Girl" by Guy de Maupassant is our second place story.   It goes into some detail about the farm woman who is the central character in the story.   As we meet her  she awakes from her nap in the barn to find she is being molested by Jacques, one of the farm hands.     She pushes him away and then they go for a walk together during which Jacques declares his love and says he wants to marry her.    She falls in love with him based on this.   When she finds she is pregnant and reminds Jacques of his promise he tells her he just said that to get her into bed and laughs.    Compressing a bit, he shortly disappears.   She has her baby at her mother's house (who dies when the premature baby is born) but she gives it to a neighbor to raise.    She returns to the farm and is a tremendous farm manager in dealing with vendors and such.   The widowed farm owner offers to marry her.  She says no, then He rapes her and then she agrees to marry him.   Six years go by and they have violent fights because she never gets pregnant and he wants a child very badly.    After a very bad fight she tells him she already had a six year old child.   The man is overjoyed and says he wanted to adopt a child since they have not had one.   All the fighting is forgotten and they are both totally happy now.   This story made me feel sympathy for the woman but  it is too sentimental and the ending does not seem right.   I am not sure what to make of rape as prelude to marriage, if it was normal or not but I have read enough of de Maupassant's stories to know he has a thing for robust women with large breasts.    You can easily find this story online.

"War" by Sherwood Anderson (from his collection The Triumph of the Egg) shows us that there is for sure more to Anderson than Winesburg, Ohio:  A Group of Stories of Small-Town Ohio Life.   I think it is clearly the best of these stories.

Pretty much every one who reads Anderson likes his work but some are, I think, put off  from reading his work by the setting of his stories.  "War" is set on a train in the USA.   The time is the years right after WWI.    There are two characters basically in the direct story (there is a story within the story-not easy to do well in six pages but he does).   One is an American man and the other is a Polish woman with a bad facial injury who is sitting near him on the train.   He talks to her a bit, she is traveling with a man who is asleep, and she learns the woman is a refuge from the war in Europe.   She begins to tell the story of how she escaped from Europe.    During the war, she was part of a group of refugees who were being directed toward a camp by a fifty year old German professor drafted into the war efforts.    In a very strange event  open to various readings the man gets into a terrible fight with a quite old refuge woman and seemingly their spirits cross.   The woman takes on the role of the man and the man acts just as the woman had done.   He says over and over he just wants to be left alone and will not move.   The old woman takes tight control of the refuges and leads them on and the man stays behind.   In the confusion the Polish woman and her lover steal some paper work and end up escaping to America (no details given as to how they do this).    I think this is the best of the stories as it does not try to force an emotional response from us.   It makes us think about what really happened during the transfer of spirits in the fight.   "War" is a deep look into how a conflict changes the lives of a few people who never wanted any changes in the first place.   I was happily lead to read it when it was the short story of the day at AmericanLit.com (they have 1000s of short stories on hand and good reading suggestions also).   Anderson makes his characters come to life by showing us small details about their faces, their clothes and such.   He does not tell us how to feel about what happens.   There is great power in what he leaves out

This not meant to suggest that Anderson is a better writer than de Maupassant for I do not think that at all.   Of de Maupassant I think you either have to get some help to find and read his best or just accept you will read some stories that are just formulas and some that are wonderful.

I am always happy to get suggestions for short stories I might like.

Mel u

Three of the Best Stories from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

"Adventure" (1919, 7 pages)
"The Untold Lie" (1919, 6 pages)
"Death"  (1919, 6 pages)

Three of the Best Short Stories of

Sherwood Anderson

In the opening chapter of his book of lectures on the short story, The Lonely Voice-A Study of the Short Story Frank O'Connor first talks about Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat".   Shortly after that he turns to the stories in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.   He says Winesburg, Ohio is the most influential American collection of interrelated short stories.    Ford Madox Ford in his The March of Literature listed it as one of the essential works of American literature.    I think somehow  many potential readers find it hard to accept that a collection of short stories set in a small town in Ohio in 1919 can look so deeply into the hidden despair in the lives of ordinary people.    (I have previously posted on Anderson's amazing short story "Hands" and there is some background information in my post on it.)     It almost seems like you walk into a small town cafe in a little town in Ohio and you find out one of the patrons has looked as deeply into the dark as Conrad or Dostoevsky.     Yesterday I read  the three short stories of Anderson that O'Connor said were his best work.  I will post briefly on them.  (His work is in the public domain now and can be easily found online-I will list a link where you can read them at the bottom of this post.)


"Adventure" is O'Connor's  and my choice for best Anderson short story.    It is about a woman driven to despair and near madness by loneliness.    I cannot really summarize the story in a way that does not lose the power of the story but I will say a bit.   It is about a woman who we meet in her early 20s.   She is a nice well mannered well brought up young woman.    I will not tell you how it happens but ends up running naked through the streets and offers herself to the first man she sees.   


"Death" is a very sad story about steps never taken.   As it opens we meet the owner of the town hotel in Winesburg (an imaginary community) and his daughter.      The daughter seems to be in her early twenties.   She wants to get married because it is what women in that age bracket do, not because she feels any great love for the man she marries.    There is nothing really wrong with him, she just does not feel a lot for her husband.   As the father is on his death bed he tells his daughter he knows he has not made much of his life.    The hotel is mortgaged so he will not be leaving her a lot.   Suddenly he tells her he has some money set aside that he was going to use to escape his life in Winesburg.    He was already planning to do it soon.    He gives the money to his daughter with and makes her promise that she will not tell her husband about the money.    He wants to at least be able to  die knowing that his daughter has her "escape money". I think there will be few people who cannot relate to the heart break at the end of this story.   


The Untold Lie" appeals to me the less of the three stories.   It is about the price people pay for what they thing is living the right way a person in Winesburg, Ohio is supposed to live. 




All of these stories are about people from what O'Connor called submerged population groups.    All of the three stories I posted on today are about being trapped, about being in a society where you are supposed 
to do certain things but no one really tells you what to do or why to do it.


All of these stories and more of Anderson can be read HERE

Mel u

"Hands" From Wineburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson-The Classics Circuit

"Hands" from Wineburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (6 pages, 1919)

The Classics Circuit-America's Lost Generation

Sherwood Anderson (1876 to 1941)

I am happy to be once again participating in The Classics Circuit.  As always, I give my great thanks to Rebecca for this great event and for encouraging the reading of classics.    The topic for March is America's Lost Generation.   The time frame is the post WWI years up until around 1930 or so.   The super star American authors of the period are F. Scott Fitzgerald,  Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, T.  S. Elliot,  Gertrude Stein,  and John Dos Passos.     In short stories, one of my primary focuses lately,   Sherwood Anderson's  Wineburg,   Ohio was and still is very influential.     The book is a collection of short stories about the ordinary people of an imaginary small town in Ohio.   Frank O'Conner  has said that the short story at its best most often focuses on people at the margins of society, people who do not quite fit in.    This is the exact focus of the wonderful stories in Winesburg, Ohio.   In his magisterial survey  The March of Literature,  Ford Madox Ford lists Wineburg, Ohio as a must read book.  

Anderson felt his best work of all time was his story "Hands", in Wineburg, Ohio.   I read all the stories and I found this the most moving one.

"Hands" is a near shocking story for its subject matter and the depth of psychological penetration.   It is one of the very few works that I am aware of that deal with a male teacher considered to be a molester of the young boys in his class in a sympathetic fashion.     Anderson does a masterful job of letting us see how a man's appearance could lead those around him to come to the conclusion he may well be a child molester (and there is nothing in the story to say the lead character is not in fact one).   It is a perfect account of the effects of profiling in a day when the word "profiling" was not even known.    The plot is simple.   A male teacher likes to show his affection for his male pupils by touching and patting them (on the back as far as we are shown).   The man does not meet the standards for a "manly man" in small town Ohio in 1919 and ends up losing his teaching job and narrowly escapes a lynch mob.    It is what this does to the protagonist that makes this story so interesting.   I do not wish to spoil the story (you can read it in just a few minutes).   The style is simple and straightforward.    This is good old fashioned story telling.    

"Hands" can be read online HERE

I am always looking for ideas for new short stories to read-please leave any suggestions you might have

Mel u







Mel u