JOHN COLLIER Fact & Fancy

Every generation or so, John Collier (1901-1980) is rediscovered. A poet, screenwriter, and novelist, Collier is best remembered for his short stories. His collection Fancies and Goodnights won an Edgar Award in 1952 for Best Story (which in MWA’s early years was occasionally awarded to a volume of stories).

- Joseph Goodrich

To be periodically rediscovered means one has been periodically forgotten. It’s odd to think of Collier as forgotten, since during his lifetime his stories appeared in high profile magazines like The New Yorker and were frequently anthologized and adapted for radio and television shows such as Suspense and The Twilight Zone. Although cultural memory is short, there are other reasons.

Part of Collier’s relative anonymity is because his oeuvre has attracted little critical attention. Betty Richardson, the author of the only book to date on Collier, adduces several arguments for this neglect. Collier’s most active decades as a writer, the 1930s and 1940s, favored work with political and social themes like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy. As someone who dabbled in fantasy and crime, Collier was simply not “relevant.”

Collier’s hallmarks—a bemused and skeptical view of humanity, a tendency to the allegorical and the timeless, a subtle yet effective use of language, sheer charm—are not generally prized by academia. There was no magnum opus, no sprawling, ambitiously overstuffed novel, merely a series of elegantly constructed stories—“wayward miniatures,” in the words of Anthony Burgess. Collier was also a genuinely modest individual, uncomfortable with the limelight and surprised that anyone would be interested in him.

None of this figures into a recipe for literary survival. Yet Collier endures. Against the odds his curiously enticing creations continue to find appreciative readers.