The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

Many readers have come to love the short story through the simple characters, easy narrative voice and humor, and compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, even those back for a second, third, or fourth look. Even now one can say, “ ‘Gift of the Magi,’ ” in a conversation about a love affair or marriage, and almost any literate person will know what is meant. It’s hard to think of many other American writers whose work has been so incorporated into our national shorthand.

O. Henry was a newspaperman, skilled at hiding from his editors at deadline. A prolific writer, he wrote to make a living and to make sense of his life. He spent his childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, and his mature years in New York City. In between Texas and New York, he served out a prison sentence for bank fraud in Columbus, Ohio. Accounts of the origin of his pen name vary: one story dates from his days in Austin, where he was said to call
the wandering family cat “Oh! Henry!”; another states that the name was inspired by the captain of the guard in the Ohio State Penitentiary, Orrin Henry.

Porter had devoted friends, and it’s not hard to see why. He was charming and had an attractively gallant attitude. He drank too much and neglected his health, which caused his friends concern. He was often short of money; in a letter to a friend asking for a loan of $15 (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: “If it isn’t convenient, I’ll love you just the same.” The banker was unavailable most of Porter’s life. His sense of humor was always with him.

Reportedly, Porter’s last words were from a popular song: “Turn up the light, for I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

Eight years after O. Henry’s death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and Letters) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a group of them met at the Biltmore Hotel in December of that year to establish some kind of memorial to him. They decided to award annual prizes in his name for short-story writers, and formed a Committee of Award to read the short stories published in a year and to pick the winners. In the words of Blanche Colton Williams (1879–1944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial was intended to “strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.”

Doubleday, Page & Company was chosen to publish the first volume,
O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories 1919
. In 1927, the society sold all rights to the annual collection to Doubleday, Doran & Company. Doubleday published
The O. Henry Prize Stories
, as it came to be known, in hardcover, and from 1984 to 1996 its subsidiary, Anchor Books, published it simultaneously in paperback. Since 1997
The O. Henry Prize Stories
has been
published as an original Anchor Books paperback, retitled
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
in 2009.

All stories originally written in the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration. Individual stories may not be nominated; magazines must submit the year’s issues in their entirety by May 1. Only stories appearing in a printed periodical are considered. No online-only publications are eligible for inclusion.

As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and each year three writers distinguished for their fiction are asked to evaluate the entire collection and to write an appreciation of the story they most admire. These three writers read the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of author or publication. They make their choices independent of each other and the series editor.

The goal of
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
remains to strengthen the art of the short story.

In the past seven
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
, work by William Trevor has appeared five times; this dedication comes in a year when we are Trevor-less.

Trevor was born in Ireland and his work is identified with the literature of that country. Trevor’s greatest gift sometimes seems to be distance. He can write as heartbreakingly about young love as he can about the weight of political troubles on obscure individual lives. He is capable of creating a character both unattractive and despicable, such as Mr. Hilditch in
Felicia’s Journey
, side by side with Felicia herself, an incorrigibly gullible young woman who becomes, by the end of that excellent novel, nearly saintly in her martyrdom and humility. Painful and involving as the novel is to read, the most disturbing moment comes when the reader begins to feel for the horrible Mr. Hilditch. Often Trevor’s deep intelligence and unobtrusively beautiful prose works coercively. In his many novels and short stories, Trevor pulls his reader out of the comfortable complacency of not being someone like Mr. Hilditch. In exchange for our discomfort, we gain insight into the criminal and unlikable, and we feel compassion, whether we want
to or not. In a collection of essays,
Excursions in the Real World
, Trevor wrote that a writer “needs space and cool; sentiment is suspect. Awkward questions, posed to himself, are his stock-in-trade.… he has to stand back—so far that he finds himself beyond the pale, outside the society he comments upon in order to get a better view of it. Time, simply by passing, does not supply that distance.…”

We can rejoice that however far William Trevor ventures beyond the pale to create his fictional world, he still returns to tell us the tale.

Every year, after the long process ends of choosing the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize stories from the many submitted, friends ask me what trends were revealed by all that reading and deliberation. The question doesn’t have to do with aesthetics or literary technique but with subject matter: What do this year’s stories show about our world?

Those who pose the question seem to believe that short-story writers are prophets or seers, or at the very least mirrors reflecting the joys and horrors of our time. It’s a common notion that writers are society’s canaries in the coal mine, sensitive and intelligent canaries who bring us news about the way we live now. Many are known for doing exactly that; Charles Dickens springs to mind, and so many other writers with a social vision such as Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Margaret Atwood. And who could have done a better job than Herman Melville of portraying the multiracial, multiethnic mix that was his America and is ours?