author
Mary Lerner
1882–1938
A little-known American short story writer, she published a small but striking body of fiction in major magazines during the 1910s. Her work is remembered for its quiet emotional insight and for stories like "Little Selves," which drew lasting attention.
1 Audiobook
Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories
by Elizabeth Ashe, Henry Seidel Canby, Cornelia A. P. (Cornelia Atwood Pratt) Comer, Charles Caldwell Dobie, Madeleine Z. (Madeleine Zabriskie) Doty, H. G. (Harrison Griswold) Dwight, John Galsworthy, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Katharine Butler Hathaway, Zephine Humphrey, Mary Lerner, F. J. Louriet, E. V. (Edward Verrall) Lucas, Margaret Lynn, C. A. Mercer, Margaret Prescott Montague, E. (Edith) Nesbit, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Dallas Lore Sharp, Margaret Pollock Sherwood, Ernest Starr, Amy Wentworth Stone, Arthur Russell Taylor
About the author
Mary Lerner was an American writer born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 22, 1882, and she died on April 28, 1938. She had a brief publishing career, but her stories appeared in prominent magazines including McCall's, Collier's, and Harper's Bazaar between 1914 and 1919.
She is especially associated with short fiction. One of her best-known stories, Little Selves, was selected for The Best American Short Stories of its year, helping preserve her reputation even though relatively little is known about her life.
Available reference sources also describe her as a Radcliffe graduate, and they suggest that she stepped away from publishing after the 1910s. That gives her work a compact, almost rediscovered quality today: a small output, but one that still interests readers of early twentieth-century magazine fiction.