Rich Hoard

THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, 1915-1950 (369 pp.)--Edited by Martha Foley--Houqhton Mifflin ($3.75).

Of all literary forms in U.S. writing, the short story has thrived most. Since 1915, when Edward O'Brien started his yearbook of The Best American Short Stories, more than 50,000 have appeared in books and magazines; how many remain unpublished, few would dare (or care) to guess.

Martha Foley, who took over O'Brien's job in 1941, has combed 35 annual anthologies and selected from them the 25 "best best" stories. The result, though highly readable, has some notable gaps. Because Editor Foley chose to abide by the judgments of earlier years, she had to pass up such masterpieces as Sherwood Anderson's Triumph of the Egg and Conrad Aiken's Silent Snow, Secret Snow, which somehow never made the yearly collections. Some master storytellers, among them Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter and John O'Hara, do not appear, while William Faulkner is represented by a mediocre sketch.

Still, The Best of the Best is a rich hoard of U.S. writing. Perhaps the one great story is Ring Lardner's Haircut, a caustic glimpse of small-town brutality; it gets better with each rereading. Close runners-up are Ernest Hemingway's My Old Man, a poignant report of a boy's affection for his father, a crooked jockey, and Wilbur Daniel Steele's How Beautiful with Shoes, an eerie description of a meeting between an imaginative lunatic and an inarticulate farm girl. Most notable contribution from the younger generation is Prince of Darkness, in which a slothful priest is sketched and skewered by Catholic Writer J. F. Powers, 34.

There are no toughie writers in Martha Foley's Best of the Best, and only a few of The New Yorker school, e.g., Kay Boyle, Irwin Shaw, in civilized coughs of irony. The bulk of the book consists of honest, strongly felt stories by authors who have profited from the example of such pioneers as Anderson and Hemingway, but have had enough intelligence and drive to cut their own paths. Stories by Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, Paul Horgan, Albert Maltz, Jean Stafford and Wallace Stegner deal with such basic human situations as the feelings of parents as they take a dead baby to the cemetery, the comic tangle of a farm hand who gets into trouble while courting, the pain of a girl recuperating from an accident. These writers offer hope that the short story in the U.S. still has a lively future.

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