er it
accessible for others to discuss.

Mrs. Colum continues: "Apart from the interesting experiments in free
verse or polyphonic prose, the short story in America is at a low ebb.
Magazine editors will probably say the blame rests with their readers.
This may be so, but do people really read the long, dreary stories of
from five to nine thousand words which the average American magazine
editor publishes? Why a vivid people like the American should be so
dusty and dull in their short stories is a lasting puzzle to the
European, who knows that America has produced a large proportion of the
great short stories of the world."

I deny that the American short story is at a low ebb, and I offer the
present volume as a revelation of the best that is now being done in
this field. I agree with Mrs. Colum that the best stories are only to be
found after a laborious dusty search, but this is the proof rather than
the refutation of my position.

Despite the touch of paradox, Mrs. Colum makes two admirable suggestions
to remedy this condition of affairs. "A few magazine editors could do a
great deal to raise the level of the American short story. They could at
once eradicate two of the things that cause a part of the evil--the
wordiness and the commercial standardization of the story. By declining
short stories over three thousand words long, and by refusing to pay
more than a hundred dollars for any short story, they could create a new
standard and raise both the prestige of the short story and of their
magazines. They would then get the imaginative writers, and not the
exploiters of a commercial article."

I am not sure that the average American editor wishes to welcome the
imaginative writer, but assuming this to be true, I would modify Mrs.
Colum's suggestions and propose that, except in an unusual instance, the
short story should be limited to five thousand words, and that the
compensation for it should not exceed three hundred dollars.

To repeat what I have said in previous volumes of this series, for the
benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and
principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the
task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary
fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists,
may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in
formulas, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than