The Best Short Stories of 1919, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

This anthology captures American letters at a pivotal moment, the first volume in Edward J. O'Brien's influential annual survey of the form. The stories gathered here reflect a nation processing the aftermath of the Great War, shifting social dynamics, and an emerging modernist sensibility while still rooted in older traditions of character and plot. O'Brien's editorial eye favored work that interrogated American optimism against harder truths, and the collection ranges from immigrant experiences to rural life to urban alienation. The opening story, Gulielma Fell Alsop's 'The Kitchen Gods,' sets the tone: a Chinese American household navigating tradition and autonomy, cultural collision rendered with subtlety rather than stereotype. The voices gathered here represent the breadth of early 20th-century American fiction, some famous now, others lost to time but preserved in these pages. For readers interested in the evolution of American short fiction, this volume offers a window into what editors and audiences valued a century ago, before modernism fully conquered the literary landscape.