The Best American Short Stories of 1948/Prize Stories of 1948: The O. Henry Awards
edited by .Houghton Mifflin, $3.75. edited by .Doubleday, $3.00.
So many ghosts stalked through the short story in 1947 that they established a trend. The revival of the ghost story, which Miss Foley notes in her Foreword, produced nothing fit for inclusion in her collection, but it’s apparent that the better authors are haunted as well. “Tension,” says Miss Foley, is the one word that best describes these stories. “There is in them definitely a feeling of expectancy, of breathless awaiting of the unknown. Perhaps a psychiatrist would say they show an ‘anxiety neurosis.’” Another trend Miss Foley discerns is a marked impoverishment of the “little magazines.”
Of the magazines represented in the two anthologies, the Atlantic and Harper’s dominate the field. The former shows up with five stories in the Foley volume, four in Mr. Brickell’s, including the First Prize winner, Truman Capote’s “Shut a Final Door.” Four stories in each book come from Harper’s, among them the winner of the O. Henry Second Prize, Wallace Stegncr’s “Beyond the Glass Mountain.”