Fifty Best American Short Stories

by Martha Foley

Short Stories by James Agee, Melius Road, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, Tillie Olson, William Eastlake, Joyce Carol Oates, Martha Foley, and many others.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a real beauty here by Kay Boyle. But most of the "usual suspects" are included (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Updike, etc) and a number of these stories have appeared in other anthologies. And to me, that's the problem. It's almost like editors have tunnel vision and pick the same ol' stories (even though they might very well be good). I'd like to read an anthology called "Great Stories By Authors You've Never Heard Of", for example. That said, a handful of authors I'd never heard of were included here. And back to Boyle, she writes by far the best story in this collection entitled "Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart." A character, Miss Del Monte is beautifully drawn (and that name! so original!) and the story stuns in only a few pages. I highly recommend Boyle's tale to anyone who enjoys short stories.

[Longhare Content · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. The stories are okay; some are very good. But the interesting thing is how the short story changed over fifty years. Most of the usual suspects are included, but there are also some names I've never come across before who I am now curious to track down: Paul Horgan, Jesse Stuart, H. W. Blattner. Kay Boyle and Hortense Calisher I've heard of but had zero familiarity with.

Another thing--when you get assigned the biggies, like Hemingway, in school, you kind of take those stories as a baseline and think that they are representative of "the way people used to write." This collection is arranged chronologically, so you trudge through the early stories, which are fairly heavy-going--not bad so much as just dense and mannered--and then suddenly there's Fitzgerald. It is a real eye opener.

One more thing--if you want to know why nobody reads short stories anymore, it's because they aren't available. The stories in this collection represent the so-called golden age of the American story, but check out the credit lines. These stories, most of them fairly edgy stuff, were first printed in general interest magazines, not just The New Yorker but also Mademoiselle, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Harper's Bazaar--things people subscribed to or picked through while waiting at the doctor's office. All those real-people markets disappeared decades ago and all the "little" magazines morphed into "literary journals" catering to writers rather than casual readers.

[Chan Fry · Rating 2 out of 5]

An ambitious project, this anthology includes short stories and novellas from fifty years of U.S. literature (1915-65), both men and women, with selections from huge names in writing (Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, etc.) as well as people you’ve only heard of if you majored in U.S. literature of the 20th Century.

As expected, I liked some and disliked others, and waded through tons of racism and sexism along the way. What I didn’t expect, but found repeatedly, was that many of the stories were poorly written — to the point of unreadability. It was a bunch of those stories that brought my overall average down to 2.2 stars. (My rating for the book is an average of my individual ratings for the stories, 111 divided by 50.)

(I have published a longer review on my website that includes mini-reviews for each of the fifty stories in this volume.)

[Félise · Rating 2 out of 5]

This took me 2 years to finish this because a lot of these stories just did not strike me as very good, which was very surprising, since the title says they're the "best."

[Alex Rodriguez]

Weekend Airbnb read

“The Survivors” -Elsie Singmaster
“I’m a Fool” -Sherwood Anderson
“My Old Man” -Ernest Hemingway
“Babylon Revisited” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

The survivors / Elsie Singmaster --3
The lost Phoebe / Theodore Dreiser --3
The golden honeymoon / Ring W. Lardner --3
I'm a fool / Sherwood Anderson --3
My old man / Ernest Hemingway --2
A telephone call / Dorothy Parker --2
Double birthday / Willa Cather --3
*The faithful wife / Morley Callaghan --
*The little wife / William March --
Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald --4
How beautiful with shoes / Wilbur Daniel Steele --2
Resurrection of a life / William Saroyan --2
Only the dead know Brooklyn / Thomas Wolfe --2
A life in the day of a writer / Tess Slesinger --3
Iron city / Lovell Thompson --
Christ in concrete / Pietro Di Donato --3
The chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck --2
Bright and morning star / Richard Wright --3
Hand upon the waters / William Faulkner --3
*The net / Robert M. Coates --
*Nothing ever breaks except the heart / Kay Boyle --
*Search through the streets of the city / Irwin Shaw --
Who lived and died believing / Nancy Hale --2
The peach stone / Paul Horgan --3
*Dawn of remembered spring / Jesse Stuart --
The catbird seat / James Thurber --4
*Of this time, of that place / Lionel Trilling --
The wind and the snow of winter / Walter Van Tilberg Clark --3
The enormous radio / John Cheever --3
Children are bored on Sunday / Jean Stafford --2
*NRACP / George P. Elliott --
In Greenwich there are many gravelled walks / Hortense Calisher --3
The other foot / Ray Bradbury --3
*Three players of a summer game / Tennessee Williams --
A mother's tale / James Agee --3
The magic barrel / Bernard Malamud --2
A circle in the fire / Flannery O'Connor --3
First flower / Augusta Wallace Lyons --
*Contest for Aaron Gold / Philip Roth --
One ordinary day, with peanuts / Shirley Jackson --3
To the wilderness I wander / Frank Butler --
The ledge / Lawrence Sargent Hill --3
This morning, this evening, so soon / James Baldwin --4
Tell me a riddle / Tillie Olsen --3
Old army game / George Garrett --
Pigeon feathers / John Updike --2
*Sound of a drunken drummer / H.W. Blattner --
Keyhole eye / John Stewart Carter --
Long day's dying / William Eastlake --
*Upon the sweeping flood / Joyce Carol Oates--

[Alberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

American short stories from 1915-1964, some of the writers well known to me and some new ones.