The Best American Short Stories of 1951
edited by . Houghton Mifflin, $3.75.
The trend in writing that impressed Martha Foley in her reading over the past year is a return to what William Faulkner (whom Miss Foley quotes) calls “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”
Although the twenty-eight short stories that Miss Foley has fastened on as the best of 1951 are for the major part works of skill and merit on a variety of levels, only six have a validity that, answers to the spirit of Mr. Faulkner’s criteria — the stories, specifically, by Peggy Bennet, Leonard Casper, R. V. Cassill, Ilona Karmel, and Oliver La Farge, and Jean Stafford’s remarkable and moving study of abnormality, “The Nemesis.”
For the rest, there is one excellent tale of wit, “Death of a Favorite,” by J. F. Powers; a spate of highly sensitized glimpses of frustration and defeat, aimless except as they reflect the moral claustrophobias of the moment; several sensitive, innocuous stories with a women’s magazine gloss to them; and a great deal of competent and subtle writing, as might be expected from a collection that includes John Cheever, Roger Angell, Tennessee Williams, Shirley Jackson. Mary Bolte, and William Goyen.