The Well-Made World of the O. Henrys, 1961-2000

Taken together the O. Henry Prize Stories volumes of the last eighty years, under four major editorships, provide a kind of case study—a unique opportunity to look into the form of American short fiction. This is particularly true of the forty years that have followed editor Harry Hansen’s O. Henry Award anthology, First Prize Stories: 1919-1960. Here we have the rare chance to perceive a remarkable bridge between modern and postmodern art. Much more than forty years seems to separate our multicultural and postmodern age from the one characterized by modernists and the special trappings of the 1960s, which included, say, political protests. However, these award stories in this particular four-decade period usher forward common themes, evolutionary trends, emergent traditions, as well as specific writers, which develop a sense of continuity.

The O. Henry awards were developed as a way of acknowledging excellence in American short fiction, but it was not until 1932 that the volumes took steps to assure that artfulness of craft was stressed over such standard storytelling devices as “surprise endings” or twist in plot, which were characteristic of the prize’s namesake. As Hansen writes in his introduction to his 1919-1960 anthology, “The judges sought originality, excellence in characterization, skill in organization of plot, power in moving emotions, and although honoring O. Henry, made demands he would have been unable to meet” (xi). For a while in the 1950s, the sequence became associated with the celebrated University of Iowa creative writing workshops—a link which gave further credibility to the stories’ stature as works of art—but after 1959, the O. Henrys severed all academic associations and became known as simply the best fiction available. The editorship of William Abrahams—novelist, poet, critic, and biographer—covered the remarkably long period 1967-1996. In 1998, when Abrahams died, Don Skiles in the Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote that the ascent of the O. Henry awards, from 1965 on, “correspond[s] with an amazing renaissance in the short story—a form, like jazz, that Americans have had a large hand in shaping” (“William Abrahams” 2).