PRIZE STORIES OF 1950: The O'Henry Awards

by Herechel- Ed Brickell ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

This year this annual collection scatters its selections more widely -- for there are entries from the Virginia Quarterly Western Review. The Sewanee Review, Tomorrow, The Yale Review (2) together with those from The American Mercury, Flair, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker (5), Harper's (2), Harper's Magazine (4), and Mademoiselle (2). Of the names with book backgrounds there is Wallace Stegner, Nelson Algren, John Cheever, Robert Lowry, Anne Goodwin Winslow, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Enright, Speed Lamkin, Kay Boyle, Ann Chidester; less well known are Peter Switzer, Donald Justice, William Humphrey, J. J. Salinger among others. The accent seems to be on children -- a child wrecking his divorced mother's chance of a second marriage, a young delinquent and his mother, childish fantasy backgrounded in terror and sorrow, a little English girl writing to an American soldier, a family's desire for an abnormal son to die, a young girl firmed in Communism by an ex-party member's fear, children's discrimination against another child, a father-son relationship; there's a Negro story, a couple with southern settings and characters, one of the breaking of a priest's morals, another of a police captain and those appearing before him, one of American occupation in Germany, of a stricken train, of divorce and a dying mother, etc., etc. The variety here is not at variance with the generally higher level of selection.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1950

Categories: FICTION