_Atlantic
Monthly_, and what holds the interest of the reader of the _Ladies' Home
Journal_.

It is my belief that the difference between these various types of
readers is pretty largely an artificial difference, in so far as it
affects the quality of entertainment and imaginative interest that the
short story has to offer. Of course, there are exceptional cases, and I
have some of these in mind, but for the most part I can perceive no
essential difference between the best stories in the _Saturday Evening
Post_ and the best stories in _Harper's Magazine_ for example. The
difference that every one feels, and that exists, is one of emphasis
rather than of type. It is a difference which is shown by averages
rather than one which affects the best stories in either magazine. Human
nature is the same everywhere, and when an artist interprets it
sympathetically, the reader will respond to his feeling wherever he
finds it.

It has been my experience that the reader is likely to find this warmly
sympathetic interpretation of human nature, its pleasures and its
sorrows, its humor and its tragedy, most often in the American magazines
that talk least about their own merit. We are all familiar with the
sort of magazine that contents itself with saying day in and day out
ceaselessly and noisily: "The _Planet Magazine_ is the greatest magazine
in the universe. The greatest literary artists and the world's greatest
illustrators contribute to our pages." And it stops there. It has
repeated this claim so often that it has come to believe it. Such a
magazine is the great literary ostrich. It hides by burying its eyes in
the sand.

It is an axiom of human nature that the greatest men do not find it
necessary or possible to talk about their own greatness. They are so
busy that they have never had much time to think about it. And so it is
with the best magazines, and with the best short stories. The man who
wrote what I regard as the best short story published in 1915 was the
most surprised man in Brooklyn when I told him so.

The truth of the matter is that we are changing very rapidly, and that a
new national sense in literature is accompanying that change. There was
a time, and in fact it is only now drawing to a close, when the short
story was exploited by interested moneymakers who made such a loud noise
that you could hear nothing else without great difficulty. The most
successful of these noisemakers are still shouting, but their