Wilbur Daniel Steele (1886–1970) American short-story writer and novelist, born March 17, 1886, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the son of a Baptist minister and professor. He grew up largely in Denver, Colorado, and graduated from the University of Denver in 1907, later studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and in Paris. He abandoned visual art for fiction after concluding he had more talent as a writer. Steele became one of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 1910s–1930s, publishing prolifically in magazines such as Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Pictorial Review, and The American Magazine. He won the O. Henry Memorial Award for best short story of the year an unmatched five times (net of ties), and was included in O'Henry Prize collections more often than almost any other writer of his era. His story "Bubbles" (also published as "Footfalls") won first prize in 1919. His fiction often drew on New England fishing villages (he and his wife, sculptor Margaret Thurston Steele, lived for years in Provincetown and Nantucket, Massachusetts, where he was part of the Provincetown Players circle alongside Eugene O'Neill), as well as settings in the American West and abroad. His stories combined vivid regional atmosphere with taut, often melodramatic or violent plots exploring guilt, passion, and moral ambiguity. Notable works include the short-story collections Land's End (1918), The Shame Dance (1923), and Tower of Sand (1929), and novels such as Isles of the Blest (1924) and That Girl from Memphis (1945). His story "How Beautiful with Shoes" (1938) is among his most anthologized works. Several of his stories were adapted for film and radio. Steele's reputation, immense in his lifetime as a master of the "well-made" magazine short story, faded considerably after his death on May 26, 1970, in Deerfield Beach, Florida, as literary tastes shifted away from the plot-driven commercial short fiction he exemplified.
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