William Sydney Porter, who wrote under the pen name O. Henry, was born in North Carolina in 1862. He started writing stories while in prison for embezzlement, a crime for which he was convicted in 1898 (it is uncertain if he actually committed the crime). His writing career was short and started late, but O. Henry proved himself a prolific and widely read short story writer in the twelve years he devoted to the craft, and his name has become synonymous with the American short story.

His years in Texas inspired many lively Westerns, but it was New York City that galvanized his creative powers, and his New York stories became his claim to fame. Loved for their ironic plot twists, which made for pleasing surprise endings, his highly entertaining tales appeared weekly in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

His best known story, "The Gift of the Magi," was written for the World in 1905 and has become an American treasure. Dashed off past deadline in a matter of hours, it is the story of a man who sells his watch to buy a set of hair combs as a Christmas present for his wife, who in the meantime has sold her luxurious locks to buy him a watch chain. "The Last Leaf" is another O. Henry favorite. It is the story of a woman who falls ill with pneumonia and pronounces that she will die when the last leaf of ivy she sees outside her Greenwich Village window falls away. She hangs on with the last stubborn leaf, which gives her the resolve to recover. She eventually learns that her inspirational leaf wasn't a real leaf at all, but rather a painting of a leaf. Her neighbor, who has always dreamed of painting a masterpiece, painted it on the wall and caught pneumonia in the process.

His work made him famous, but O. Henry was an extremely private man who, sadly, preferred to spend his time and money on drink, and ultimately it was the bottle that did him in. He died alone and penniless in 1910. O. Henry's legacy and his popularization of the short story was such that in 1918 Doubleday, in conjunction with the Society of Arts and Sciences, established the O. Henry Awards, an annual anthology of short stories, in his honor. Anchor Books is proud, with the eighty-first edition of the series, to continue the tradition of publishing this much beloved collection of outstanding short stories in O. Henry's name.

The seventeen stories included in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards were chosen by the series editor, Larry Dark, from among the three thousand or so short stories published during the course of the previous year in the magazines consulted for the series and listed in the "Short-Listed Stories" section. Blind copies of these seventeen stories, that is, copies with the names of the authors and magazines omitted, were then sent to the prize jury members. Each juror was instructed to vote for his or her top three choices, and the first-, second-, and third-prize winners were determined as a result of these votes. The jurors for the 2001 volume were Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, and Mona Simpson. An introduction by one of the three jurors precedes each of the top-prize stories selected.

A shortlist of fifty other stories given serious consideration for Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards, along with brief summaries of each, can be found in the "Short-Listed Stories" section.

The Magazine Award is given to the magazine publishing the best fiction during the course of the previous year, as determined by the number of stories selected for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, the placement of stories among the top-prize winners, and the number of short-listed stories. The Magazine Award winner for 2001 is The New Yorker. A citation for this award is provided in the "2001 Magazine Award" section.

THE JOB of choosing twenty or so short stories out of more than three thousand published during the course of a year requires that an editor be receptive, even somewhat passive. You have to wait for the stories to come to you, keep an open mind, and be prepared to find the unexpected in unexpected places. At the same time, it also helps to be actively looking for certain kinds of stories. While the purpose of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards is to present the reader with a core representation of the year's most interesting and accomplished short fiction, an editorial focus can illuminate and sharpen a collection. Of course, no single idea can sweep up all of the work selected for a single edition of The O. Henry Awards. To impose one would result in excluding some of the year's best stories, whose excellence most often depends on their originality. Nonetheless, in the course of reading a huge volume of work in a given year, connections emerge. Certain ideas are simply out there at any time, part of a collective consciousness that writers and editors tap into, knowingly or not.

One trend that I found to be prevalent when reading for this volume was the publication of more long stories or novellas than I had previously encountered. The first one I came across was Andrea Barrett's "Servants of the Map," published in Salmagundi. At forty-five pages, I first thought it might be too long to put in The O. Henry Awards, but I found myself engrossed by the story of a young Englishman on a mapping expedition of the Himalayas in the 1860s. In the end, I not only concluded that it was possible to include a novella-length story but also began to look for other long stories to group with it.

Because there's a limit to the length of a given volume of The O. Henry Awards, I decided that I would have to take out one story for every long story or novella I chose to include. I settled on a plan of three long pieces, with a total of seventeen stories in the book rather than the customary twenty -- provided I could find other long stories that were good enough. This was a difficult commitment to make because I know that inclusion in a volume of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards can provide a boost to an author or a magazine, but I felt that what was gained balanced out what was lost. Long stories allow for a fuller exploration of ideas, a larger plot trajectory, and a richer, more novelistic sense of detail. Including such stories, I hope, will expose readers to the possibilities for the story form toward the longer end of the spectrum, while also reflecting a strong recent trend in fiction writing.

As it happened, it wasn't difficult to find more good long stories. Rather, I discovered, it was difficult to narrow down the field. Among the other notable novella-length stories I read during 2000 were Junot Díaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," from The New Yorker; Mary Helen Stefaniak's "The Turk and My Mother," from Epoch; and John Updike's "Nelson and Annabelle," a sequel to his Rabbit cycle of novels, published in two parts in The New Yorker. The second long story that became a serious contender for the collection, however, was George Saunders's sharply satirical "Pastoralia," from The New Yorker. Viewing length as a virtue rather than a limitation, I consulted the longer version, which is the title story of Saunders's collection, and decided to run it in this form.

The story I chose as the third long piece for the collection turned out to be this year's first-prize winner, Mary Swan's "The Deep." If I hadn't specifically been looking for long stories, this vivid, accomplished story set during World War I may have escaped my notice. Over the years, I have come to accept the fact that three thousand or so stories is too much for any single reader to keep up with and devote full attention to, so I've enlisted sharp-eyed assistants to do some of the preliminary reading -- for this volume, Augustine Chan and Denise Delgado. As part of our frequent discussions over the course of the year, I told each to be on the lookout for good long stories. It was Denise who first read "The Deep" in The Malahat Review, late in the year, and recommended that I consider it for one of the long story slots. Mary Gordon discusses what makes this such a remarkable piece of writing in her citation for "The Deep".

A second element common to Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards is that crime plays an important part in several of the stories. In Joyce Carol Oates's "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," a teenage girl is abducted and brutalized. In William Gay's "The Paperhanger," a young child disappears and the mystery is grimly resolved some time later. "Bow Down," by Murad Kalam, concerns an enterprising inner-city youth who takes over an abandoned house in a poor Phoenix neighborhood and turns it into a haven for drug dealers and junkies, pimps and whores. In "Bliss," by Dale Peck, a man takes home the paroled murderer of his mother, in an effort to bring closure to the childhood trauma he endured. And T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Love of My Life" offers a fictional interpretation of a tragic, much-publicized real-life event.

I come across stories concerned with crime and violence every year, so I wouldn't say these subjects were uniquely characteristic of the fiction I encountered in 2000. Unlike my inclusion of long stories, this was not a theme I deliberately pursued; this focus only became apparent to me after I'd made my final choices. Crime and violence are an unavoidable part of the world we live in, and serious literary writers can't avoid the subject altogether, nor should they. A criminal act is inherently dramatic -- either something definitive occurs that has an immediate impact on characters or it is the culmination of other events in the story. The trick in keeping the story from crossing the line -- and it can be a fine line -- into a more lurid genre of fiction is to steer clear of exploiting tragedy for entertainment's sake and to avoid seeking to titillate readers gratuitously. One way to handle this is to explore the aftermath of a violent act, the moral and psychological consequences, without describing in detail the act itself. Another path, chosen by some of the authors of the stories in this collection, is to take an unflinching look at a violent crime itself, to take the measure of its physical and psychological impact when it happens, center stage. The risks to this approach can be great, but the results can be powerful and accomplished, eye-opening and thought-provoking.

There are other common elements to the stories collected here, and interesting, odd little connections among them. For instance, in both this year's second-prize winner, "Big Me," by Dan Chaon, and Kalam's "Bow Down," young protagonists break into neighbor's houses. In "Big Me," the twist is that the child illegally enters the house of a man who he fantasizes is his future self. Michael Chabon's introduction goes into more detail on the inventiveness and subtlety of Chaon's story. An even odder connection is that in both Swan's "The Deep" and Elizabeth Graver's "The Mourning Door," a character finds the hand of a child. In "The Deep," the hand is discovered in the middle of a road "lying palm up in the dust," a desolate symbol of the senseless destruction of war. In "The Mourning Door," a woman hoping to become pregnant finds a "walnut-sized hand" in her bed. One child's hand represents the end of life, the other the beginning -- an elegant opposition no editor could plan.

In addition to these small coincidences, certain larger themes and common subjects are likely to be represented in any distillation of a given year's work. Cancer plays a part in this year's third-prize winner, Alice Munro's "Floating Bridge," as well as in Fred G. Leebron's "That Winter," which links a man's midlife crisis to his sister's fatal illness. A broad, humorous tone is shared by Saunders's "Pastoralia" and Pinckney Benedict's "Zog-19: A Scientific Romance," a story with Kurt Vonnegut-like sci-fi overtones that is also about the waning of the American family farm. The romance at the heart of Benedict's story connects it to stories in this collection that concern love and the complexity of human relationships: for example, David Schickler's charming "The Smoker" and Antonya Nelson's witty and observant "Female Trouble." Romantic relationships also figure strongly in "At the Jim Bridger," by Ron Carlson, which, like Leebron's story, grapples with a male protagonist in the throes of a midlife crisis. "Revival Road," by Louise Erdrich, touches on the theme of love and involves car theft and a police chase, connecting it to the stories in which crime plays a part. It also shares star-crossed young lovers with Boyle's "The Love of My Life."

The contributors' notes reveal another interesting and unanticipated link. Chaon's "Big Me," Barrett's "Servants of the Map," Erdrich's "Revival Road," and Swan's "The Deep" are all, by their authors' accounts, stories that were several years in the making. I can't recall another volume in which so many contributors discussed working at a single story for such a long time. That might be something else that was in the air last year: a long-awaited coming to fruition of difficult and complex work.

This is the fourth volume for which I have asked each prize juror -- for 2001, Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, and Mona Simpson -- to introduce his or her favorite work. These concise, intelligent, and insightful essays have become an essential part of each collection, one that greatly adds to the pleasure of reading the top-prize-winning stories. O. Henry Awards jury duty involves reading blind copies of the complete set of stories I choose for the collection and voting for first-, second-, and third-prize winners. The introductions to these stories offer the astute observations of accomplished authors and often provide an inside perspective on the current state of fiction. Because the jurors are primarily fiction writers and sophisticated readers of fiction, these essays also lay out emotional connections to the work. I'm grateful to the fifteen writers who in the last five years have given so generously of themselves and their valuable writing time to serve this function.

One curious result of the outcome of the jury process is that a single author, Alice Munro, one of the most important short story writers of our time, has three times been named a third-prize winner in the past four volumes of the series and never placed first or second. I think it's because, even reading blind, writers know a Munro story when they read one. Most are long-time admirers of her work and have favorite Munro stories against which they weigh any new story of hers that they read, so that Munro is not just competing against the other stories in the collection but also against her reputation and her own best work.

This year, when I read "Floating Bridge" and another story by Alice Munro not included in this collection, "Post and Beam," both in The New Yorker, I found myself faced with a difficult choice. It was so difficult that I briefly considered including both. This didn't prove to be practical, but it occurred to me that Munro was deserving of special praise for her brilliant work in the short story form. In compiling a complete list of O. Henry Award winners since the inception of the series in 1919,\\Fn="fn1"1\\Fn I found that the previous series editor, William Abrahams, had four times bestowed a Special Award for Continuing Achievement -- to Joyce Carol Oates in 1970 and 1986, to John Updike in 1976, and to Alice Adams in 1982 -- and I decided to resurrect the award for Alice Munro. Of all the writers currently publishing short stories who have not thus far achieved this honor, none is more deserving than she. "Floating Bridge" marks her fourth appearance in this series. But it wasn't until 1997 that Canadian authors were made eligible for inclusion in The O. Henry Awards. Who knows how many times Munro's stories would have been chosen had they been considered from the start? By way of a citation for this special honor and an introduction to the third-prize-winning story, I will leave it to Mona Simpson to introduce "Floating Bridge" and discuss the impact of Munro's work, which she does with passion and eloquence.

And though I need hardly justify honoring one of the world's greatest living writers, I can't help but profess great admiration for Alice Munro's writing. It has that magical quality of drawing the reader in and presenting a deep and vivid experience, yet it does so without over-specifying. There are mysteries in every Munro story that invite the reader's participation, mysteries that never can be entirely solved. She often presents a great sweep of time in a single story and bounds over many years in the telling. Munro's protagonists are usually women, and their struggles are in most cases with or against their marriages, the choices they have made and those they haven't, accommodations they have come to regret or one day will. Still, the stories she writes are of near universal appeal and moral relevance. Her writing is traditional in its scope, yet often experimental in its use of time and narrative structure. I would call her a feminist, but her work is always illustrative and never didactic. Her stories are well worth reading for anyone trying to learn how to write short fiction, and yet they are so idiosyncratic and often so fully realized that her writing remains beyond imitation. Most of all, I think of an Alice Munro story as working on several levels and plumbing the depths of experience with great artistry and humanity.

It's my pleasure to bestow upon Alice Munro this Special Award for Continuing Achievement. As the name implies, this is an award for writers with impressive bodies of short story work behind them but still at the height of their powers. As the name also implies, this is an award that will be given judiciously and on an irregular basis in the years ahead. The short story is not an easy form, and greatness is difficult to attain in any artistic endeavor. Nonetheless, on the basis of the work I read every year and the fiction collected here, I can't help but feel optimistic.

LARRY DARK, 2001