The Selected Stories of O. Henry - Softcover

O. Henry; Porter, William Sydney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1420955411 ISBN 13: 9781420955415

Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing, 2017

Synopsis

O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter, is known for his short stories with surprise endings. In this collection you will find the following beloved O. Henry stories: “The Plutonian Fire”, “The Princess and the Puma”, “By Courier”, “The Gift of the Magi”, “The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein”, “Mammon and the Archer”, “The Memento”, “Springtime À La Carte”, “The Last Leaf”, “The Skylight Room”, “The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock”, “The Count And The Wedding Guest”, “The Romance of a Busy Broker”, “The Higher Pragmatism”, “While the Auto Waits”, “The Social Triangle”, “After Twenty Years”, “The Green Door”, “A Lickpenny Lover”, “Lost on Dress Parade”, “Transients in Arcadia”, “Brickdust Row”, “The Furnished Room”, “Schools And Schools”, “The Defeat of the City”, “Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches”, “From Each According to his Ability”, “The Cabellero’s Way”, “Hygeia at the Solito”, “The Higher Abdication”, “A Double-Dyed Deceiver”, “Friends in San Rosario”, “The Hiding of Black Bill”, “Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet”, “The Man Higher Up”, “The Handbook of Hymen”, “Telemachus, Friend”, “The Lonesome Road”, “A Retrieved Reformation”, “The Renaissance at Charleroi”, “The Thing’s the Play”, “Tobin’s Palm”, “A Newspaper Story”, “Proof of the Pudding”, and “Confessions Of A Humorist”. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

About this title

About the Author

Victoria Blake is a freelance writer. She has worked at The Paris Review and contributed to the Boulder Daily Camera, small literary presses in the United States, and English-language publications in Bangkok, Thailand. She currently lives and works in San Diego, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Victoria Blake’s Introduction to Selected Stories of O. Henry

 

During O. Henry’s most productive year, 1904, he wrote and published sixty-five stories, an impressive number made more so by the fact that the following year he published fifty more. During this time he had a contract with the New York World that called for a story a week, a pace that would have run other writers dry but that O. Henry kept up for more than two years. Along with the panoply of magazine stories, he published ten books from 1904 until his death in 1910. All told, O. Henry penned some 300 stories during a literary career shorter even than that of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s. O. Henry said once that every story he ever wrote was published somewhere, and at his peak his stories were worth nearly a thousand dollars each on the literary marketplace. 

 

O. Henry worked at a whirlwind speed, producing more over a shorter period than any other writer of his time and cultivating a literary demand unmatched by anyone, anywhere, in the history of American letters. By 1920, 5 million copies of his books had been sold in the United States alone, a staggering amount considering the size and scope of early-twentieth-century publishing in America. In 1919, when the annual O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories volume was inaugurated, his name had become synonymous with the short story, a measuring stick against which all other stories published during that time were held. He was a six-foot shadow to which other writers (including Joseph Conrad, Paul Charles Joseph Bourget, Edith Wharton, and H. G. Wells) were compared. But O. Henry himself was held above comparison. “It is idle to compare O. Henry with anybody,” said Henry James Forman, in a statement that nicely summed up the prevailing attitude toward the author; “the combination of technical excellence with whimsical sparkling wit, abundant humour, and fertile invention is so rare that the reader is content without comparisons” (Smith, O. Henry Biography, p. 12; see “For Further Reading”).

 

During his lifetime and immediately following his death, O. Henry’s reputation rose to unparalleled heights, but in the late 1910s the foundation of this reputation started to crumble. One critic publicly denounced him as a “pernicious influence” on the American short story, concluding that he had done irreparable damage to the form. Others saw him as nothing more than a comic writer whose stories were simply trumped-up journalism with overhashed trick endings and undue sentimentality, and they dismissed him with a shrug and a wave.

 

As an indication of O. Henry’s fall from vogue, by 1930 he was the subject of only ten published master’s theses and three books of personal remembrance. In the 1940s and 1950s, there appeared only a single published dissertation and one scholarly article. By the 1960s, the shadow cast by O. Henry’s reputation seemed to have shrunk from a six feet to six inches and it appeared that the cult of O. Henry was not only dead, but dead and buried. Today, the critics and scholars who by their attention raise and uphold a writer’s position in the canon of American letters largely ignore him. So what happened? How did the reputation of a writer of O. Henry’s stature, talent, and fame rise and fall so meteorically? And, most important, was his fall justified?

About this edition

• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1420955411
• ISBN 13: 9781420955415
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288