 September 1964 issue | |
| Founder | Whit Burnett and Martha Foley |
|---|---|
| First issue | 1931, 1989, 2014, 2019 |
| Final issue | 1967, Winter 2000, 2016 |
| Company | The Story Press F&W Publications |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Story is a literary magazine published out of Columbus, Ohio. It has been published on and off since 1931. Story is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and receives support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Ohio Arts Council.
Story was founded in 1931 by journalist-editor Whit Burnett and his first wife, Martha Foley, in Vienna, Austria. Showcasing short stories by new authors, 67 copies of the debut issue (April–May, 1931) were mimeographed in Vienna, and two years later, Story moved to New York City, where Burnett and Foley created The Story Press in 1936.
By the late 1930s, the circulation of Story had climbed to 21,000 copies. Authors introduced in Story included Charles Bukowski, Erskine Caldwell, John Cheever, James T. Farrell, Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams and Richard Wright. Other authors in the pages of Story included Ludwig Bemelmans, Carson McCullers and William Saroyan. The magazine sponsored various awards (WPA, Armed Forces), and it held an annual college fiction contest.
Burnett's second wife, Hallie Southgate Burnett, began collaborating with him in 1942. During this period, Story published the early work of Truman Capote, John Knowles and Norman Mailer. Story was briefly published in book form during the early 1950s, returning to a magazine format in 1960. Due to a lack of funds, Story folded in 1967, but it maintained its reputation through the Story College Creative Awards, which Burnett directed from 1966 to 1971.
Story was revived in 1989 as a quarterly by the husband and wife team of publisher Richard Rosenthal and editor Lois Rosenthal, fulfilling their promise to Burnett that they would relaunch the magazine someday. [1] The magazine was published by F&W Publications in Cincinnati. With a circulation of 40,000, Story was a five-time finalist and two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for fiction. The Rosenthals featured such established authors as Andrea Barrett, Barry Lopez, Joyce Carol Oates, and Carol Shields while also introducing new authors such as Junot Díaz, Elizabeth Graver, and Abraham Rodriguez. With the sale of F&W forthcoming, the Rosenthals brought Story to an end with the Winter 2000 issue. [2] [3]
Having obtained the rights for the name of the magazine from Lois Rosenthal, [4] in 2014, Travis Kurowski relaunched Story as a double-side annual publication out of York College. Authors published during this era include Etgar Keret, Tao Lin, Lincoln Michel, Timothy Liu, Mary Miller, and Christine No. After three issues, the magazine shut down in 2016.
Two years later, Michael Nye revived Story, establishing the magazine as the cornerstone of a non-profit, independent arts organization based in Columbus, Ohio. The revival issue appeared in March 2019, and featured new work by Marilyn Abildskov, Yohanca Delgado, Michael Martone, Phong Nguyen, Anne Valente, Dionne Irving, and Claudia Hinz. Each issue features the work of an Ohio artist on its cover and writing by an Ohio author in its pages. The triannual magazine publishes in February, June, and November.
Story has consistently been one of the first to publish writers who have later been awarded literary honors such as the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Conrad Aiken was the first Story writer to win an O. Henry Award, when his short story "The Impulse" (April 1933) was honored. The following year, William Saroyan's classic "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" won the Third Place Award. Another Saroyan Story-published work, "The Three Swimmers and the Educated Grocer", would also claim an O. Henry Award in 1940.
In 1935, Nelson Algren won the first of his three O. Henry Awards for his short story "The Brother's House". He was one of three writers published in Story that year who were honored (the other winners were Dorothy McCleary for "Little Elise" and Jerome Weidman for "My Father Sits in the Dark"). The following year, Story scored three more O. Henry Award winners (Ernest Brace for "Silent Whistle"; Elizabeth Coatsworth for "The Visit" and Eric Knight for "The Marne"); followed by four winners in 1937 (Hamlen Hunt for "The Saluting Doll"; J.M. McKeon for "The Gladiator"; Katherine Patten for "Man Among Men"; and Prudencio de Pereda for "The Spaniard" in 1937). Placing multiple winners into the annual O. Henry Award anthology became an annual tradition for Story into the mid-1940s.
Algren's friend Richard Wright won Second prize in the O. Henry Awards for his Story-published "Fire and Cloud" in 1938. Hallie Southgate Abbett's story "Eighteenth Summer" won Third Prize in 1941, while in 1943, Third Prize was awarded to William Fifield's "The Fisherman of Patzcuaro".
Between 1934 and 1946, 25 writers had won 27 O. Henry Awards, including Irwin Shaw (for "God on a Friday Night" in 1939) and Mary O'Hara, whose 1941 O. Henry Award-winning "My Friend Flicka" which served as the basis for a popular movie. (Along with Saroyan, Hamlen Hunt was a double-winner.) Most winners from Story did not win a top prize (First, Second or Third), but were honored by being cited as one of the best stories of their respective year. The honor carried with it the privilege of being published in the annual anthology of short stories by O. Henry Award winners.
After the 1989 revival of the magazine, Story writers continued the O. Henry Award-winning tradition.
William Saroyan was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, The Human Comedy.
Nelson Algren was an American writer. His 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm won the National Book Award and was adapted as the 1955 film of the same name.
The O. Henry Award is an annual American award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American short-story writer O. Henry.
Kay Boyle was an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and political activist. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and O. Henry Award winner.
The Kenyon Review is a literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, US, home of Kenyon College. The Review was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959. The Review has published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O'Connor, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Hecht, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Woody Allen, Louise Erdrich, William Empson, Linda Gregg, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Ha Jin.
Dan Chaon is an American writer. Formerly a creative writing professor, he is the author of three short story collections and four novels.
Josephine Winslow Johnson was an American novelist, poet, and essayist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel, Now in November. To this day she's the youngest person to win the Pulitzer for Fiction. Shortly thereafter, she published Winter Orchard, a collection of short stories that had previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The St. Louis Review, and Hound & Horn. Of these stories, "Dark" won an O. Henry Award in 1934, and "John the Six" won an O. Henry Award third prize the following year. Johnson continued writing short stories and won three more O. Henry Awards: for "Alexander to the Park" (1942), "The Glass Pigeon" (1943), and "Night Flight" (1944).
Kevin John Brockmeier is an American writer of fantasy and literary fiction. His best known work is The Brief History of the Dead, 2006.
Richard Lange is an American writer. After receiving a degree in film from the University of Southern California, he traveled to Europe and taught English for Berlitz in Barcelona, Spain. Returning to Los Angeles, he was hired as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications and eventually became managing editor of RIP, a heavy-metal music magazine. He later edited textbooks before becoming managing editor of Radio & Records, a radio-industry trade magazine.
Pinckney Benedict is an American short-story writer and novelist whose work often reflects his Appalachian background.
Lois Rosenthal was an American author, publisher, arts & humanities philanthropist, and community volunteer. She was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. She served on the boards of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Freestore Foodbank, Art Links, Cincinnati Museum Center, and the Mercantile Library of Cincinnati. She was known for her hands-on philosophy of service in her community and was named Enquirer Woman of the Year in 1999 by The Cincinnati Enquirer.
Thomas Glave is an American academic and author.
Cornelia Nixon is an American novelist, short-story writer, and teacher. She has lived much of her mature life in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Melissa Pritchard is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and journalist.
The Malahat Review is a Canadian quarterly literary magazine established in 1967. It features contemporary Canadian and international works of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction as well as reviews of recently published Canadian literature. Iain Higgins is the current editor.
Martha Foley cofounded Story magazine in 1931 with her husband Whit Burnett. She achieved some celebrity by introducing notable authors through the magazine such as J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams and Richard Wright. In 1941 she became the series editor for The Best American Short Stories series.
Whit Burnett was an American writer and educator who founded and edited the literary magazine Story. In the 1940s, Story was an important magazine in that it published the first or early works of many writers who went on to become major authors. Not only did Burnett prove to be a valuable literary birddog for new talent, but Story remained a respectable though low-paying alternative for stories rejected by the large-circulation slick magazines published on glossy paper like Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post or the somewhat more prestigious and literary slick magazines such as The New Yorker. While Story paid poorly compared to the slicks and even the pulps and successor digest-sized magazines of its day, it paid better than most of, and had similar cachet to, the university-based and the other independent "little magazines" of its era.
Ann Harleman is an American novelist, scholar, and professor.
The Neon Wilderness (1947) is the first short-story collection by American writer Nelson Algren. Two of its stories had received an O. Henry Award. Algren received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters the same year.
New Ohio Review is a national literary magazine produced by the creative writing program of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Published biannually since 2007, the magazine showcases short fiction, poetry, and essays. Writers published by New Ohio Review have included Tony Hoagland, Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, and Rachel Zucker, among others. Pieces Appearing in New Ohio Review have been included in such anthologies as The Best American Series and the Pushcart Prize anthology. The journal is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant.