The New Yorker Stories

In 1928, just after he published his first novel Strange Fugitive in New York, Morley Callaghan wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: “Here is something I thought you might be able to tell me about. Do you think The New Yorker would be a good magazine for my stories? They have never printed fiction before, but are going to start with that story of mine called “An Escapade.” Perkins replied: “As for The New Yorker I think it has a very excellent type of circulation from your standpoint and ours…”

Through the thirties, through the Depression, Callaghan did an astonishing thing: he kept himself and his family alive by writing short stories that Hemingway compared to Joyce, fiction that brought praise from Wyndham Lewis and Edmund Wilson and led the New York Times to say: “If there is a better story writer in the world we don’t know where he is.”

Of the more than one hundred short stories Morley Callaghan published in his lifetime, twenty-one appeared over a ten year period in the New Yorker. As the Montreal Gazette has said: “It doesn’t matter what generation the people who read these stories belong to Callaghan can take you where a tv camera can’t go to inside your own skin.”