''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.

History

''Story'' was founded in 1931 by journalist-editor

Whit Burnett Whit Burnett (August 14, 1899 – April 22, 1973) 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 wr ...

and his first wife,

Martha Foley Martha Foley (March 21, 1897 – September 5, 1977) 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 an ...

, in

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, 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 Henry Charles Bukowski ( ; born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, ; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted ...

Erskine Caldwell Erskine Preston Caldwell (December 17, 1903 – April 11, 1987) was an American novelist and short story writer. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native Southern United States, in novels such as '' Tobacco Road'' (1 ...

John Cheever John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; ...

, James T. Farrell,

Joseph Heller Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His best-known work is the 1961 novel ''Catch-22'', a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for ...

, J. D. Salinger,

Tennessee Williams Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the thre ...

and Richard Wright. Other authors in the pages of ''Story'' included

Ludwig Bemelmans Ludwig Bemelmans (April 27, 1898 – October 1, 1962) was an Austrian-American writer and illustrator of children's books and adult novels. He is known best for the '' Madeline'' picture books. Six were published, the first in 1939. Early life ...

Carson McCullers Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, '' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter'' (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits ...

and

William Saroyan William Saroyan (; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) 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 ''Th ...

. 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 Truman Garcia Capote ( ; born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, ...

, John Knowles and

Norman Mailer Nachem Malech Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007), known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, filmmaker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, 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. The magazine was published by

F&W Publications F+W, (formerly F+W Publications and F+W Media), was a media and e-commerce company headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1913, F+W published magazines, books, digital products (including e-books and e-magazines), produced online video, offer ...

in Cincinnati. With a circulation of 40,000, ''Story'' was a five-time finalist and two-time winner of the

National Magazine Award The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Or ...

for fiction. The Rosenthals featured such established authors as

Andrea Barrett Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection ''Ship Fever'' won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book ''Servants of the Map ...

Barry Lopez Barry Holstun Lopez (January 6, 1945 – December 25, 2020) was an American author, essayist, nature writer, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. In a career spanning over 50 years, h ...

, Joyce Carol Oates, and

Carol Shields Carol Ann Shields, (née Warner; June 2, 1935 – July 16, 2003) was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel '' The Stone Diaries'', which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well a ...

while also introducing new authors such as

Junot Díaz Junot Díaz (; born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was fiction editor at ''Boston Review''. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedo ...

, Elizabeth Graver, and Abraham Rodriguez. With the sale of F&W forthcoming, the Rosenthals brought ''Story'' to an end with the Winter 2000 issue. Having obtained the rights for the name of the magazine from Lois Rosenthal, in 2014, Travis Kurowski relaunched Story as a double-side annual publication out of York College. Authors published during this era include

Etgar Keret Etgar Keret ( he, אתגר קרת, born August 20, 1967) is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television. Personal life Keret was born in Ramat Gan, Israel in 1967. He is a third chil ...

Tao Lin Tao Lin (; born July 2, 1983) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer, and artist. He has published four novels, a novella, two books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a memoir, as well as an extensive assortment of ...

, 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 Michael Martone (born August 22, 1955 in Fort Wayne, Indiana) is the author of nearly 30 books and chapbooks. He was a professor at the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where he taught from 1996 until his retirement in ...

, 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.

O. Henry Awards

Conrad Aiken Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) was an American writer and poet, honored with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and was United States Poet Laureate from 1950 to 1952. His published works include poetry, short s ...

was the first ''Story'' writer to win an

O. Henry Award 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. The ''PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories'' is an annual collection of the year's twenty best ...

, when his short story "The Impulse" (April 1933) was honored. The following year,

's classic "

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze", originally published under the title "The Flying Trapeze" and also known as "The Man on the Flying Trapeze", is a 19th-century popular song about a flying trapeze circus performer, Jules Léota ...

" 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 Nelson Algren (born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham; March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) 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. Algren articulated ...

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 Irwin Shaw (February 27, 1913 – May 16, 1984) was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best known for two of his novels: '' The Young Lions'' ...

(for "God on a Friday Night" in 1939) and

Mary O'Hara Mary O'Hara (born 12 May 1935) is an Irish soprano and harpist from County Sligo. She gained attention on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her recordings of that period influenced a generation of Irish female singer ...

, whose 1941 O. Henry Award-winning "

My Friend Flicka ''My Friend Flicka'' is a 1941 novel by Mary O'Hara, about Ken McLaughlin, the son of a Wyoming rancher, and his mustang horse Flicka. It was the first in a trilogy, followed by ''Thunderhead'' (1943) and ''Green Grass of Wyoming'' (1946). The p ...

" 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.

References

External links

Archives of ''Story Magazine'' and Story Press, 1931-1999
at Princeton University Manuscripts Division (archived in 2011)
''Story'' (September 1964): "What Kind of Person Was Frank Harris? A Cold Look" by Whit Burnett (full text)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Story (magazine) 1931 establishments in Austria 2000 disestablishments in Ohio Quarterly magazines published in the United States Literary magazines published in Austria Defunct magazines published in Austria Defunct literary magazines published in the United States Defunct literary magazines published in Europe Magazines established in 1931 Magazines disestablished in 2000 Magazines published in Cincinnati Magazines published in Vienna

History

O. Henry Awards

References

Further reading

External links