The “Best” Short Stories? Two lists—one recent and one from 1914—show their strengths and limitations

“Best of” lists often make us wonder if they exist solely to goad us into generating new and better lists. Many of us love lists, and indeed in only two months we’ll be announcing here the sure-to-be-controversial “Fifty Funniest American Writers” selected by Andy Borowitz for an upcoming Library of America volume.

Along these lines, we noticed the “Best Short Stories of All Time,” a recent list bravely compiled by the fifteen staff members of One Story, who posted a “long list” on their blog and featured the top ten, plus a few runners-up, on Flavorwire. Among the excellent stories on the long list were entries by three Library of America authors: Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Flannery O’Connor. Still, it’s notable that a mere two stories (by Kafka and Garcia Marquez) were originally written in a language other than English—and only two others (by Joyce and Gallant) were written by non-Americans. And, except for the selections by Kafka and Joyce, all the stories were published since World War II.

While pondering whether every “best of” list inevitably reflects the prejudices of the time, we stumbled upon “What is the Best Short Story in English?,” a survey The New York Times conducted in 1914. The Times sought out the opinions of “a score of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic . . . who are writing or have written the short stories of this generation.” And, sure enough, we found that even a century ago the distinguished jurors did not reach much beyond their contemporaries or the previous generation for their favorites.

Among those who participated in the survey were writers who are still familiar to readers today: Richard Harding Davis, Edna Ferber, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Jack London, Booth Tarkington, Owen Wister. We are also gratified to see among the jurors several less well-known authors whose works have been revisited in recent Library of America anthologies: Robert W. Chambers (author of the chilling “The Repairer of Reputations”), Irvin S. Cobb (“Cobb Fights It Over Again”), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (“Luella Miller,”), and Owen Johnson (“The Great Pancake Record”).

Thomas Hardy echoed his fellow writers when he rejected the concept of “best”:

One may be the best tragic short story, the other may be the best tranquilly domestic short story, and so on, and unless you decide which is "best," tragedy, comedy, or tragi-comedy, the question is unanswerable. It seems as impossible to say which is the best of these forms of art as to define which is the best color, or the best taste in food.

Owen Wister adds, “You have asked a question to which there really is no answer, and you know as well as I do that if the replies you are going to receive coincide it would be amazing enough to become historic in a small way.”

Like One Story’s list, most of the 1914 selections were written during the previous half-century—and a good number were written by the jurors’ contemporaries. Half of the forty-five stories were written by just four authors: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe. Although the list includes many stories and authors still read and loved by readers today, there are notable omissions for a survey conducted in 1914: Scott, Hawthorne, Disraeli, Trollope, and Gissing (all of whom were featured in a best-selling story anthology published the same year by Oxford University Press). Missing, too, is “Désireé’s Baby,” by Kate Chopin, which was called “one of the most perfect stories” and “well nigh perfect” by anthologists in 1906 and 1915, respectively. And, of course, readers and critics wouldn’t rediscover poor, neglected Herman Melville until the 1920s.

Without further ado, then, here are the “Best Stories in English” from 1914:

Chosen by four jurors
Bret Harte	The Outcasts of Poker Flat
Robert Louis Stevenson	A Lodging for the Night

Chosen by three jurors
Joseph Conrad	Heart of Darkness
O. Henry	A Municipal Report
Rudyard Kipling	Without Benefit of Clergy
	The Brushwood Boy
	The Man Who Would Be King

Chosen by two jurors
Irvin S. Cobb	The Belled Buzzard
Charles Dickens	A Christmas Carol
Bret Harte	The Luck of Roaring Camp
Edgar Allan Poe	The Fall of the House of Usher
	The Gold Bug

The rest of the list
Thomas Bailey Aldrich	Marjorie Daw
The Bible	Ruth and Naomi
Edward Bulwer-Lytton	The House and the Brain
Arthur Conan Doyle	The Ring of Thoth
Charles Dickens	The Cricket on the Hearth
	Dr. Marigold
	The Story of Richard Doubledick
Sarah Barnwell Elliott	An Incident
Edward Everett Hale	The Man Without a Country
Joel Chandler Harris	Uncle Remus
Washington Irving	Rip Van Winkle
	Wolfert Webber
Henry James	The Turn of the Screw
Rudyard Kipling	Beyond the Pale
	Bread Upon the Waters
	The Jungle Book
	The Maltese Cat
A. Neil Lyon	Love in the Mist
Gouverneur Morris	The Claws of the Tiger
Edgar Allan Poe	The Murders of the Rue Morgue
	The Purloined Letter
Robert Louis Stevenson	Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
	Markheim
	The Merry Men
	Pavilion on the Links
	Providence and the Guitar
	Will o' the Mill
William Makepeace Thackeray	Rebecca and Rowena
Mark Twain	The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
H. G. Wells	The Door in the Wall
Edith Wharton	A Journey
Stephen French Whitman	His Wife
Jesse Lynch Williams	The Stolen Story

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• The death of the book is greatly exaggerated
• The best-selling titles in The Library of America’s first three decades
• After 150 years, readers and writers still wonder: Is there—or can there be—a Great American Novel?