"Likable vignettes of Mexican-American life in pre-WWII Los Angeles,Tufts's stories offer an amiable if by now old-fashioned simplicity, often with an O. Henry twist. A charming assemblage of characters."
Fifty years ago, things were different in Los Angeles and across the United States. For one thing, every home did not have a television set back then, and many people got their entertainment by reading short stories that were published regularly by magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Now, although a few magazines occasionally publish short fiction, the golden age of the short story has passed, and the stories that show up in today's literary magazines are not the entertaining tales they used to be.
Of course another big difference between the Los Angeles of the 1940s and the city of today has to do with the city itself. It was a smaller, slower, friendlier, happier, safer city. That's not to deny that L.A. had its dark side fifty years ago, but it was possible (and fashionable) for sentimental short story writers-and sentimental readers too-to discover joy in even the poorest ethnic neighborhoods of one of America's largest cities.
One such writer was Kingsley Tufts (1907-1991), who began writing short stories in 1939 and began selling his stories to The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers in 1946. Tufts had been educated at New Albany Business College and at Stanford University, where he had received an A.B. degree in economics in 1929 and had later studied philosophy. He gave up academics in 1939 to become a writer, although that career was interrupted by World War II, during which time he worked as an executive in the shipyards of San Pedro. It was during his stint in San Pedro that Tufts met the people who were to inspire and inhabit so many of his stories, including his Pico Street Stories. He discovered, in the Mexican-American community of greater Los Angeles, a combination of simplicity and nobility that he admired greatly and celebrated sentimentally in his heartwarming popular fiction.
The short stories of Kingsley Tufts are old fashioned: they're well-constructed tales with beginnings, middles, and ends, and with quirky characters and surprising plots in which good people are rewarded with happy endings. They have been collected and are being presented again in book form by a publisher who believes that there are still readers who value well-crafted, traditional fiction, just as there are people who remember fondly the Los Angeles (and other cities) of simpler times.
