O Henry Awards: Prize Stories 1962

Doubleday and Company, 250 pages

Reading short stories that are almost fifty years old is a nice form of literary time travel: as a genre, the short story tends to favor the modern era and so this collection of fifteen stories gives a pretty good glimpse into a lost world, one that not even the best season of Mad Men has quite been able to touch. The politics and social concerns of the entire era run as an undercurrent to these stories, whether its racism in John Updike's The Doctor's Wife or Cold War relations in Tom Cole's Familiar Usage in Leningrad.



Cole's story is one of the best in the collection. It was his first published work and he would go on to write several books and plays, including his most successful work Medal of Honor Rag. Leningrad's narrative concerns itself with the bittersweet affair between an American ex-pat and the Russian girl he meets in Leningrad (otherwise known as St. Petersburg). Written during the Cold War, the story succeeds in discussing the "Us vs. Them" philosophy of the Cold War era without becoming dogmatic. And, in a nice example of content dictating form, much of the story's structure is reminiscent of other Russian writers, including Chekhov.

Equally intriguing was The Aztec Dog by John Graves, a Texan author who continues to write to this day. Set in Mexico, the story details the tense relationship between Fernando Iturriaga and the troubled boy who is in his care. It's a quietly subversive story with a violent conclusion which succeeds in taking the reader by surprise. There is also Mary Deasy's The People With the Charm, a simple story with a great deal of humor at its heart.

Thomas Whitbread's The Remember, chronicles a few days in the life of a man who remembers too much and his encounter with another man who remembers nothing at all. There's a quirky feel to this story which anticipates the hyper-quirky stories of modern stories like Aimee Bender and Etgar Keret - writers who excel at revealing the pathos in the absurd.  Here Whitbread does the same thing as his character wanders through New York, remembering absurdly tiny details about his life, and encountering the engimatic Harry Samson, who has decided to become an amnesiac and "resets" his memory every morning. It's a witty and poignant examination of the process of memory and our obsessions with legacy.

Other stories, like the aforementioned Updike tale, touch on the racial disharmony that filled America in the early 60s, a discord which continues 'til today. This gives many of the stories an unfortunate resonance. There is also a refreshing number of female writers in the collection (almost half) and an equally refreshing number of stories written in third person - a pleasant change since today's fiction tends to gravitate obsessively towards the first person. There may not be a story for everyone in this specific collection, but it remains a fine window into both the literary world of the time and social concerns of an era long since past.