ENTHUSIAST FOR SHORT STORY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21959, 10 May 1941, Page 4

ENTHUSIAST FOR SHORT STORY

E. J. O’Brien Dead THE very sudden death of Edward * Joseph Harrington O’Brien on February 25 from heart failure, at his home at Gerrards Cross, will come as a sad shock to friends almost literally the world over, states The Tinies Literary Supplement. Born at Boston, Mass., in 1890, and educated at Boston College and Harvard University, he had made England his home since the end of the last war. He married twice—his first wife was Romer Wilson, who died in 1930—apd leaves a widow and three children. Beat known as the originator and editor since 1915 of annual selections of The Best Short Stories of America and England—volumes which in America had almost academic standing —his influence contributed powerfully to making the contemporary short story a more flexible, realistic and vital vehicle of artistic expression, and there are very few among the outstanding short-story writers of to-day, to either country, who do not owe something, and often much, to his untiring encouragement and friendship during their earliest struggles for recognition. His passion for the short story was disinterested and inexhaustible; he seemed to read everything, in print or in manuscript, and to miss nothing. The successful American magazine Story, the English New Stories, and the forthcoming English Story all acknowledge his Inspiration. But his work for the short story did not begin to compass him, nor in truth did any of his published books, neither his earlier volumes of quiet, sensitive, accomplished verse, nor his The Dance of the Machines (a study of machineage America through the keyhole of the American popular short story); One touches him closest indeed, but still incompletely, to his Son of the Morning (1932), a dramatic biographical "portrait” of Nietzsche apt to be set aside by the orthodox Nietzschean as over-subjective, yet for that very reason the more deeply expressive of its author’s nature. He was, to fact, a man of larger promise than the exigencies of life allowed him to fulfil, a remarkable man, as characteristically Irish as his name, the most fascinating of friends, and he surprised continually by the range and detail of his information and understanding. He also seemed to know everyone everywhere! He was to the truest sense mysterious because one could set no limlte to him, and even to middle age he caused those who knew him best to anticipate confidently his eventual flowering. One had simply not thought o£ his dying, expecting so much from mm still.