Short Story

Six.  That’s how many books I’ve started, and not finished in the last two months.  I have three books on my nightstand, one by my chair in the living room and a couple more in the office.  This might suggest that I spend a lot of time reading, but that’s not the case.  Rather, it’s just that I can’t get into some of these books.  For instance, I read The DaVinci Code last year by Dan Brown and loved it.  It was a real page-turner and I couldn’t put it down.  I bought Angels and Demons by the same author, a book he wrote prior to writing The DaVinci Code.  I’m about a quarter of the way through the book and my boredom threshold has kicked in.  I’ve put it aside and probably won’t pick it up again.

I’m headed to Virginia Beach for a family soon and I’m going to take two books with me.  The first is The Whore’s Child by Richard Russo. This is a collection of seven short stories and I’ve read the title story.  I was a captive audience for the better part of an hour.   I’ve read three of Russo’s novels, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man and Empire Falls.  Nobody’s Fool was made into a movie, Empire Falls won a Pulitzer Prize and Straight Man was my favorite of the three. 

The other book, You Know Me Al – A Busher’s Letters, is by Ring Lardner and was first published in 1914.   Ray Horncastle, a friend, was visiting Chicago and sent me the Chicago Tribune Magazine from several weeks back.  The entire issue is dedicated to the history of baseball in Chicago and what the game has meant to the windy city.  Ray knows that I closely follow the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs.  The words, diehard and long-suffering, are often used to describe people like me.  Lardner was a sportswriter for the Tribune and his book tells the story of a rookie’s season through his letters to his pal back home.  Three of those letters were excerpted in the magazine and after I read them, I purchased the book.

In the forward to Lardner’s book, his son John wrote that the letters were written because “there was an urgent need around the home for the two hundred dollars that each of the first installments brought from The Saturday Evening Post.”  Later letters fetched as much as $1,250.  Like The Whore’s Child, You Know Me Al is a collection of short stories.

The short story as an art form has all but died.  In the 1940’s Houghton Mifflin published a collection of the best American short stories each year.  Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, William Saroyan, Ray Bradbury, Walter Van Tillburg Clark and Irwin Shaw were just a few of the writers.  The American Mercury, Harpers Bazaar, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Story and Collier’s Weekly were among the magazines that had first published the writer’s work.

Each of the writers mentioned above wrote books that entertained and influenced thought in this country.    Several of these authors were represented in the anthologies I read in high school.  Each story entertained and taught a lesson.   I wonder how the collections being read today differ from what I read in the late fifties?

My favorite writer of the Dan Brown, John Grisham genre of escapism fiction is John D. MacDonald.  He wrote more than 80 novels and is perhaps best known for his 20 or so Travis McGee novels.  Toward the end of his life his publisher put out a collection of his short stories called, The Good Old Stuff.  In the forward, Mr. MacDonald wrote that he started out writing short stories.  He said that at any given time he had as many as 30 stories on the way to potential publishers.  He also said that those short stories allowed him to earn a living and develop as a writer.