In 1997, Annie Proulx was awarded the Dos Passos Prize, a mid-career award for American writers. Proulx has twice won the O. Henry Prize for the year's best short story. In 1998, she won for "Brokeback Mountain", which had appeared in "The New Yorker" on October 13, 1997. Proulx won again the following year for "The Mud Below," which appeared in "The New Yorker" June 22 and 29, 1999. Both appear in her 1999 collection of short stories, "". The lead story in this collection, entitled "The Half-Skinned Steer", was selected by author Garrison Keillor for inclusion in "The Best American Short Stories 1998," (Proulx herself edited the 1997 edition of this series) and later by novelist John Updike for inclusion in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" (1999). In 2001 Proulx was one of the writers heavily criticized by Brian Reynolds Myers in his polemical work "A Reader's Manifesto".