land_
was first issued in Iowa City. It attracted very little attention,
and in the course of the year published but ten short stories. It has
been my pleasure and wonder to find in these ten stories the most vital
interpretation in fiction of our national life that many years have been
able to show. Since the most brilliant days of the New England men of
letters, no such group of writers has defined its position with such
assurance and modesty.

One new short story writer has appeared this year whose five published
stories open a new field to fiction and have a human richness of feeling
and imagination rare in our oversophisticated literature. I refer to the
fables of Seumas O'Brien. At first one is struck with their utter
absence of form, and then one realizes that this is a conscious art that
wanders truant over life and imagination. In Seumas O'Brien I believe
that America has found a new humorist of popular sympathies, a rare
observer and philosopher whose very absurdities have a persuasive
philosophy of their own.

The two established writers whose sustained excellence this year is
most impressive are Katharine Fullerton Gerould and Wilbur Daniel
Steele. Lincoln Colcord's two stories show qualities of artistic
conscience reenforcing an imaginative substance so real that another
year or two should suffice for him to take his place with the leaders
of American fiction. I must affirm once more the genuine literary art
of Fannie Hurst. The absolute fidelity of her dialogue to life and its
revealing spirit, not despite, but rather because of the vulgarities
she accepts, seem to me to assure her permanence in her best work.

A rare literary art, not dissimilar in fundamentals, and quite as
marvellously documented, is revealed by Rupert Hughes in his series of
stories in the _Metropolitan Magazine_ this year. In "Michaeleen!
Michaelawn!" he has succeeded greatly. It is a story which it will be
difficult for Americans to forget.

What must have begun as a doubtful experiment and been continued only
because it was a triumphantly demonstrated success has been the serial
publication for the great average American public of my selection of
the best twenty-one stories published in 1914. The _Illustrated Sunday
Magazine_ has evidently justified its daring, and the bold pioneering
of its editor, Mr. Hiram M. Greene, to judge from the host of letters
I have received from readers who have not read the best magazines in
the pa