Best American Short Stories 1951 part one
Martha Foley, the editor of the Best American Short Stories series from 1941 to 1977, introduces the 1951 volume (whose stories were published in magazines in 1950) with a note on the nuclear anxiety hanging over the literature: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” She quotes at length from Faulkner’s Nobel speech about rediscovering “the old verities and truths of the heart,” positing that some writers are trying to do that now, and that a modernism-damaged literary world finds it “corny.”
1. Flight Through the Dark by Roger Angell
This first story is appropriately placed after the introduction as its main character, a traveling bureaucrat named Halleck, suffers from anxiety and dread stemming partly from recent and current world events–WWII, the new war in Korea, a photograph from Hiroshima–while flying alone. A visit to his less lucky-in-life sister increases his gloom. At the end he melts back into his comfortable life.
Rating: 4.2 of 10
2. Inland, Western Sea by Nathan Asch
A group of strangers on the same bus touch each others’ lives briefly in this fairly well-executed piece.
Rating: 5.5 of 10
3. A Fugitive From the Mind by Peggy Bennett
I liked this morbid tale of accidental death and guilt. It doesn’t feel dated in the least and contains some fine writing: “He was acquainted with the gaudy comic books. Thus, when he saw crudely pictured on coarse paper the Nazi doctor killing innocents by slowly tightening clamps on their heads, testing the scientific theory that the skull can be decreased by 10 percent before it cracks, Ezzie, farm boy alone, felt the fine frenzy of conquests, of wars and guerrilla stabbings, appeal in all its glamour to his ego.”
Rating: 7.4 of 10