Background

Henry Herschel Brickell was born on September 13, 1889 in Senatobia, Mississippi, the son of Henry Hampton and Lula Johns Harrison Brickell. During his childhood in Yazoo City, Miss. , he developed the lifelong habit of reading omnivorously.

Education

Brickell studied at the University of Mississippi from 1906 to 1910 but did not graduate with his class because, as he later said, he failed mathematics "with perfect regularity. "

Career

On leaving the university Brickell became a sportswriter and news writer for the Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama, and four years later accepted an editorial position on the Daily News in Pensacola, Florida. His employment there was interrupted in May 1916 when he joined the First Regiment of the Alabama National Guard for service in Mexico. He was soon given the rank of battalion sergeant major but was invalided home because of ill health (gastrocuteroptosis) on October 6, 1916.

For the next three years he worked on the Daily News in Jackson, Mississippi, and in 1919 he moved to New York City, where Brickell joined the news copy desk of the New York Evening Post. He remained there for four years, becoming associate literary editor and conductor of a daily column. Brickell became editor of the general publishing department of Henry Holt and Company in 1928 and stayed with the firm until 1933.

He returned to the Evening Post early in 1934 to write the column "Books on Our Table, " which he continued for the next eight years. From January 1934 to March 1935 he also contributed monthly full-length book-review articles to the North American Review under the title "The Literary Landscape, " covering both fiction and nonfiction.

He became widely known for his book reviews, which appeared not only in the above publications but also in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Saturday Review of Literature. Brickell also contributed numerous articles on literary subjects to the Review of Reviews, Forum, Publishers' Weekly, and other journals.

Although brought up in the South, Brickell identified himself completely with the driving work ethos, viewpoint, and sophistication of New York, and in his literary reviews he excoriated the rabble-rousing Southern politicians as "blab-mouthed blatherskites, " citing Huey Long as one of the worst.

Although he was assisted by a committee of judges and influenced by his wife's excellent taste, he alone was responsible for the final selection. During these years he thus helped to shape the style of the American short story.

In 1940 Brickell assumed the editorship of the annual volumes of the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for Doubleday, Doran and Company, beginning with the twenty-third annual volume in 1941.

In October 1941 Brickell went to South America as one of the first cultural-relations officers attached to the Foreign Service Auxiliary, which was organized to cultivate closer relations with Latin America during World War II. He was assigned to Bogotss and established there one of the first United States cultural centers. Within a year it was conducting classes in English for more than 1, 000 students.

His article "Popay n, Cradle of Colombia, " published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1944, is a brilliant and affectionate description of one of Colombia's most beautiful towns. And his recollections of Federico García Lorca, published in the same journal the following year under the title "A Spanish Poet in New York, " made an unforgettable portrait of that tragic Spanish poet and dramatist.

Brickell left the national government in 1947 to serve as consultant to the International Institute of Education from 1947 to 1949, and as lecturer at the Blowing Rock Summer School of English in North Carolina, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, the University of Missouri Workshop, and the Writers' Conference at the University of New Hampshire, which he had joined as an original staff member in 1938.

In 1949 he conducted a course in the short story at Fordham University and in 1951 and 1952 lectured for the Department of State on North American literature. In the latter year he and his wife toured South America for the Department of State and the Rockefeller Foundation, studying progress in the humanities. Soon after returning from this trip Brickell committed suicide (he died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his locked garage) at his home in Branchville, Connecticut, presumably despondent over a health problem.

He had already suffered two coronary attacks. Brickell's published works reflect his wide range of interests as translator, compiler, anthologist, and literary critic.

They include several editions in Spanish of lectures on the history and literature of the United States that he delivered in Bogot , a translation into Spanish of an anthology entitled Cosecha Colombiana (1944), and, with Dudley Poore and Harry R. Warfel, an anthology of short stories by United States authors that was published in Buenos Aires in 1945 as Cuentistas Norteamericanos. In the same year, with the assistance of Carlos Videla, he translated into English Ricardo Rojas' El Santo de la Espada ("The Saint of the Sword") under the title San Martín: Knight of the Andes; and he contributed a chapter on Venezuela and Colombia to a symposium entitled What the South Americans Think of Us.

In 1951 he translated into English a study of Abraham Lincoln by the Cuban historian Emeriterio Santovenia, and he made a Spanish translation of Walden by Henry David Thoreau, whom he admired, but this work was burned. In 1947 Brickell edited the Pocket Book of O. Henry Prize Stories and two years later edited Writers on Writing and collaborated on Our Living Novelists.

In an article entitled "The Present State of Fiction" in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1949, he protested against the vacuity of modern fiction. He summarized his theories of the short story, particularly the similarity between the short story and poetry, in a stimulating essay in the September 1951 issue of Atlantic. At his death he left uncompleted a manuscript history of Natchez.

Brickell died in 1952 and is buried in Jackson, Mississippi.

Achievements

• Brickell received the Guggenheim Award for general non-fiction in 1939. In 1939 he also received Rosenwald and Guggenheim fellowships for his research and creative writing. His success won him the plaudits of the Colombians, who regarded Brickell as an outstanding exemplar of the Good Neighbor policy. The Department of State recognized his achievements and appointed him assistant chief of the Division of Science, Education and Art, and, successively, acting assistant chief, acting chief, and ultimately chief (1946) of the Division of International Exchange of Persons in the Department of State in Washington, D. C. While employed in government Brickell continued his editorial and writing interests. Because of his work reviewing manuscripts for the publishing firms of Holt and Macmillan, writing his book-review columns, and editing the O. Henry Memorial Stories, he became one of the arbiters of the American literary scene during his lifetime.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Pocket Book of O. Henry Prize Stories (Pocket Books 446)

    (PAPERBACK ORIGINAL FIRST EDITION, Pocket Book #446, print...)

  • O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1941

    (Contributing Authors Kay Boyle, Eudora Welty, Hallie Sout...)

  • Prize stories Volume 1; The O. Henry awards

    (This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)

  • PRIZE STORIES OF 1950 THE O. HENRY AWARDS

    (NY 1950 first edition. Doubleday. Hardcover octavo. 325p....)

  • Prize Stories of 1942 (O.Henry Memorial Award)

    (vintage book)

  • Prize Stories Of 1943 O. Henry Memorial Reward
  • Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1943
  • Prize Stories of 1946: The O'Henry Memorial Award
  • O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1944
  • Prize Stories 1949 : The O. Henry Awards
  • O. Henry Memorial Award Prize stories of 1948

Views

In general his political views were conservative; he was critical of the New Deal, of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and of the growing appeal of communism, clearly defining himself as an anti-Marxist. He considered it to be his main duty as a reviewer of books to give readers a balanced judgment as to what to read and what not to read, and accordingly did not hesitate to disagree with other critics or to characterize as "trash" books which he considered to be such.

In making his choices he emphasized flexibility, innovation, and artistic impulse as requirements of the genre. For each volume he wrote a charming and intimate introduction that attested to his literary sincerity and meticulous fairness in selection.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Of him a fellow critic later commented, "No more mellow and less doctrinaire critic ever made interesting the book-pages of New York. "

Connections

When Brickell worked on the Daily News in Jackson, Mississippi, he met Norma Long, a local pianist. They were married on March 17, 1918.

Father:

Henry Hampton Brickell

Mother:

Lula Johns Harrison Brickell

Wife:

Norma Long

Friend:

Ernest Hemingway

American journalist, novelist, and short-story writer

Friend:

Margaret Mitchel

American novelist and journalist who wrote under the name Peggy Mitchell

Friend:

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

educational reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author

Friend:

Langston Hughes

American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist

Friend:

Robert Frost

Brickell was a personal and professional friend of many of the literary celebrities of the 1930's and 1940's, including Robert Frost, Margaret Mitchell, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, William Faulkner, John P. Marquand, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Mark Van Doren.

Friend:

Mark Van Doren

American poet, writer and critic

Friend:

John P. Marquand

American writer originally best known for his Mr. Moto spy stories

Friend:

William Faulkner

American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi

References

• Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817-1967