Status
Available
Collection
Genres
Publication
P. F. Collier (1908)
Description
An omnibus volume containing 286 stories and poems.
Language
Original publication date
1928
1979
User reviews
LibraryThing member TadAD
There's a reason the award for short stories is called the "O. Henry Award." These volumes are it.
LibraryThing member MissWoodhouse1816
My most favourite short story writer! O. Henry is brilliant, and I am thrilled to have all of his stories, poems, and letters in one place. A must read for anyone who calls themself a "reader"!
LibraryThing member jburlinson
Many are classics, of course. "Gift of the Magi," "Ransom of Red Chief", etc. I find if you read 3 or 4 at a time, you will be immensely entertained. If you read 5 or 6, you will start to feel a little impatient. If you read more than 10 at one go, you will swear off O. Henry for a decade or two.
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The twist endings get to be a little bit much. However, in honor of O. Henry, I will end this review by pointing out that 3 days after he died, the United States Post Office Department ruled that children could no longer be sent via parcel post Show Less
LibraryThing member RussellBittner
“And most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another, being oft associated, until not even obituary notices them do part” (p. 1,046).
The above is vintage O. Henry — as is the following: “(l)ove and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are
Both, I suspect, come from deep within the heart of an author whose collected works of fiction I’ve just finished. These works — all short stories, by the way, and all written in a single decade — were dropped into my lap, as it were, by Ms. Serendipity in the form of a Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc. compilation (© 2006) when I passed by her one day at the 8th Street Book Exchange in Park Slope, Brooklyn (NY). One thousand four hundred and twenty pages of fine print (and two months) later, you could say I’d been blessed — and given the gift of a lifetime. (Or at least “…of the Magi” — O. Henry’s most famous short story and quite possibly the best short story in the North American Canon.)
But there are others, dozens of others.
My favorites? “The Gift of the Magi,” of course. But also “The Last Leaf”; “Springtime à la Carte”; “The Third Ingredient”; “The Greater Coney”; and “The Church with an Overshot-Wheel” — just for starters. And for the sheer musicality of the piece, “The Caballero’s Way.”
Consider the lyricism of this paragraph from “The Clarion Call”: “All over the city the cries were starting up, keen and sonorous, heralding the changes that the slipping of one cogwheel in the machinery of time had made; apportioning to the sleepers while they lay at the mercy of fate, the vengeance, profit, grief, reward and doom that the new figure in the calendar had brought them. Shrill and yet plaintive were the cries, as if the young voices grieved that so much evil and so little good was in their irresponsible hands. Thus echoed in the streets of the helpless city the transmission of the latest decrees of the gods, the cries of the newsboys — the Clarion call of the Press” (p. 518).
But before we leave O. Henry’s observations of Manhattan — the setting, in my opinion, for his best stories — consider the author’s less than dewy-eyed view of the denizens of that same woe-begotten island in the very next story, “Extradited from Bohemia”: “The most pathetic sight in New York — except the manners of the rush-hour crowds — is the dreary march of the hopeless army of Mediocrity” (p. 519). The rest of the paragraph bears direct citation, but I’ll leave that to you to discover on your own.
In “The Last of the Troubadours,” O. Henry makes clear on which side of the fence the likes of you and me are standing, even if his Latin is more colloquial than correct: “You should know that omnoe personoe in tres partes divisoe sunt. Namely: Barons, Troubadours and Workers. Barons have no inclination to read such folderol as this; and Workers have no time: so I know you must be a Troubadour, and that you will understand Sam Galloway. Whether we sing, act, dance, write, lecture, or paint, we are only troubadours; so let us make the worst of it” (p. 1,155).
And so, quite appropriately, from the author of “A Dinner at _____” on what we ‘troubadours’ might realistically expect — our so-called ‘rate of return’ — we have:
“ ‘See that auto-cab halfway down the block? I shouted. ‘Follow it. Don’t lose sight of it for an instant, and I will give you two dollars!’
“If I only had been one of the characters in my story instead of myself(,) I could easily have offered $10 or $25 or even $100. But $2 was all I felt justified in expending, with fiction at its present rates” (p. 1,324).
Wishing, perhaps, to establish a sleuth as memorable as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, O. Henry establishes for the length of a couple or three stories his French detective Tictocq and plays farcically (yet fantastically!) with the French language, character and mythopoesis in “Tracked to Doom.”
Apart from having written some achingly sentimental (though not maudlin…never maudlin!) stories, O. Henry can be piquantly acerbic — as can be seen in this parody of a certain (other) notable author’s style:
“ ‘Now look across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay. At my finger. At my finger. Across the bay. Across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay.’ This for about three minutes.
“He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain. It seemed easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I’ll bet that if he used the phrases: ‘Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward—or rather laterally — in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet,’ and ‘Now, returning — or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit’ — I’ll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination” (p. 1,215).
O. Henry’s prose is no less barbed when he turns the jib of his pen to public readings by fellow writers, as he did in “The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes”:
“ ‘Perhaps,’ said Jolnes, with a smile, ‘it might be called something of the sort. To be frank with you, Whatsup, I’ve cut out the dope. I’ve been increasing the quantity for so long that morphine doesn’t have much effect on me anymore. I’ve got to have something more powerful. That telephone I just went to is connected with a room in the Waldorf where there’s an author’s reading in progress. Now, to get at the solution to this string’ ” (p. 1,232).
Even entire countries are not immune to the rapier-like slash of O. Henry’s wit, the evidence for which we see in “A Ruler of Men” when he refers to a certain fictive South American country (sounding suspiciously like Ecuador, by the way) as “that land of bilk and money” (p. 1,278).
It is generally acknowledged that O. Henry was a tippler, and that he died — at least to some degree as a result of this little vice — with exactly 23¢ in his pocket. But I would suggest that anyone who can write so lovingly of a certain weed as O. Henry did was no less a lover of tobacco—which, at today’s tax-engorged prices here in NYC, would’ve given him up for dead long before the alcohol did him in. We find, then, the following in “Transformation of Martin Burney”:
“For three days he managed to fill his pipe from other men’s sacks, and then they would shut him off, one and all. They told him, rough but friendly, that of all things in the world tobacco must be quickest forthcoming to a fellow-man desiring it, but that beyond the immediate temporary need(,) requisition upon the store of a comrade is pressed with great danger to friendship” (p. 1,249).
And from the same story:
“ ‘You like-a smoke while we wait,’ he asked.
“Burney clutched it and snapped off the end as a terrier bites at a rat. He laid it to his lips like a long-lost sweetheart. When the smoke began to draw(,) he gave a long, deep sigh, and the bristles of his gray-red mustache curled down over the cigar like the talons of an eagle. Slowly the red faded from the whites of his eyes. He fixed his gaze dreamily upon the hills across the river. The minutes came and went” (p. 1,250).
I would be doing O. Henry a disservice if I failed to include at least one citation on his favorite subject. To wit:
“ ‘So, as I’ve said, a woman needs to change her point of view now and then. They get tired of the same old sights — the same old dinner table, washtub, and sewing machine. Give ‘em a touch of the various — a little travel and a little rest, a little tomfoolery along with the tragedies of keeping house, a little petting after the blowing-up, a little upsetting and a little jostling around — and everybody in the game will have chips added to their stack by the play’ ” (p. 386).
A word or two of caution to the reader who comes to O. Henry for the first time: cozy up to a good dictionary (I, personally, learned about two hundred new words in this reading); then put your widgets and gadgets away and find a quiet, well-lit place. O. Henry’s stories require intense concentration. The master of the surprise ending may insert a turnabout word or phrase at any point in his narrative or dialogue…you may miss it (as I did many times in spite of reading under the best of all possible circumstances — viz., on a quiet little hill in an out-of-the-way corner of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden)…at which point, you will have lost the entire thread of the story.
And get used to the Latin “viz.” (anglice: ‘namely’). O. Henry uses it over and over again — as he does “table d’hôte” (the rough equivalent of which would be a communal table at a ‘prix fixe,’ or, in other words, a ‘cheap or set meal’). And then, bon appétit! Or rather, bonne lecture!
RRB
10/24/13
Brooklyn, NY
The above is vintage O. Henry — as is the following: “(l)ove and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are
Show More
nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving” (p. 382).Both, I suspect, come from deep within the heart of an author whose collected works of fiction I’ve just finished. These works — all short stories, by the way, and all written in a single decade — were dropped into my lap, as it were, by Ms. Serendipity in the form of a Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc. compilation (© 2006) when I passed by her one day at the 8th Street Book Exchange in Park Slope, Brooklyn (NY). One thousand four hundred and twenty pages of fine print (and two months) later, you could say I’d been blessed — and given the gift of a lifetime. (Or at least “…of the Magi” — O. Henry’s most famous short story and quite possibly the best short story in the North American Canon.)
But there are others, dozens of others.
My favorites? “The Gift of the Magi,” of course. But also “The Last Leaf”; “Springtime à la Carte”; “The Third Ingredient”; “The Greater Coney”; and “The Church with an Overshot-Wheel” — just for starters. And for the sheer musicality of the piece, “The Caballero’s Way.”
Consider the lyricism of this paragraph from “The Clarion Call”: “All over the city the cries were starting up, keen and sonorous, heralding the changes that the slipping of one cogwheel in the machinery of time had made; apportioning to the sleepers while they lay at the mercy of fate, the vengeance, profit, grief, reward and doom that the new figure in the calendar had brought them. Shrill and yet plaintive were the cries, as if the young voices grieved that so much evil and so little good was in their irresponsible hands. Thus echoed in the streets of the helpless city the transmission of the latest decrees of the gods, the cries of the newsboys — the Clarion call of the Press” (p. 518).
But before we leave O. Henry’s observations of Manhattan — the setting, in my opinion, for his best stories — consider the author’s less than dewy-eyed view of the denizens of that same woe-begotten island in the very next story, “Extradited from Bohemia”: “The most pathetic sight in New York — except the manners of the rush-hour crowds — is the dreary march of the hopeless army of Mediocrity” (p. 519). The rest of the paragraph bears direct citation, but I’ll leave that to you to discover on your own.
In “The Last of the Troubadours,” O. Henry makes clear on which side of the fence the likes of you and me are standing, even if his Latin is more colloquial than correct: “You should know that omnoe personoe in tres partes divisoe sunt. Namely: Barons, Troubadours and Workers. Barons have no inclination to read such folderol as this; and Workers have no time: so I know you must be a Troubadour, and that you will understand Sam Galloway. Whether we sing, act, dance, write, lecture, or paint, we are only troubadours; so let us make the worst of it” (p. 1,155).
And so, quite appropriately, from the author of “A Dinner at _____” on what we ‘troubadours’ might realistically expect — our so-called ‘rate of return’ — we have:
“ ‘See that auto-cab halfway down the block? I shouted. ‘Follow it. Don’t lose sight of it for an instant, and I will give you two dollars!’
“If I only had been one of the characters in my story instead of myself(,) I could easily have offered $10 or $25 or even $100. But $2 was all I felt justified in expending, with fiction at its present rates” (p. 1,324).
Wishing, perhaps, to establish a sleuth as memorable as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, O. Henry establishes for the length of a couple or three stories his French detective Tictocq and plays farcically (yet fantastically!) with the French language, character and mythopoesis in “Tracked to Doom.”
Apart from having written some achingly sentimental (though not maudlin…never maudlin!) stories, O. Henry can be piquantly acerbic — as can be seen in this parody of a certain (other) notable author’s style:
“ ‘Now look across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay. At my finger. At my finger. Across the bay. Across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay.’ This for about three minutes.
“He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain. It seemed easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I’ll bet that if he used the phrases: ‘Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward—or rather laterally — in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet,’ and ‘Now, returning — or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit’ — I’ll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination” (p. 1,215).
O. Henry’s prose is no less barbed when he turns the jib of his pen to public readings by fellow writers, as he did in “The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes”:
“ ‘Perhaps,’ said Jolnes, with a smile, ‘it might be called something of the sort. To be frank with you, Whatsup, I’ve cut out the dope. I’ve been increasing the quantity for so long that morphine doesn’t have much effect on me anymore. I’ve got to have something more powerful. That telephone I just went to is connected with a room in the Waldorf where there’s an author’s reading in progress. Now, to get at the solution to this string’ ” (p. 1,232).
Even entire countries are not immune to the rapier-like slash of O. Henry’s wit, the evidence for which we see in “A Ruler of Men” when he refers to a certain fictive South American country (sounding suspiciously like Ecuador, by the way) as “that land of bilk and money” (p. 1,278).
It is generally acknowledged that O. Henry was a tippler, and that he died — at least to some degree as a result of this little vice — with exactly 23¢ in his pocket. But I would suggest that anyone who can write so lovingly of a certain weed as O. Henry did was no less a lover of tobacco—which, at today’s tax-engorged prices here in NYC, would’ve given him up for dead long before the alcohol did him in. We find, then, the following in “Transformation of Martin Burney”:
“For three days he managed to fill his pipe from other men’s sacks, and then they would shut him off, one and all. They told him, rough but friendly, that of all things in the world tobacco must be quickest forthcoming to a fellow-man desiring it, but that beyond the immediate temporary need(,) requisition upon the store of a comrade is pressed with great danger to friendship” (p. 1,249).
And from the same story:
“ ‘You like-a smoke while we wait,’ he asked.
“Burney clutched it and snapped off the end as a terrier bites at a rat. He laid it to his lips like a long-lost sweetheart. When the smoke began to draw(,) he gave a long, deep sigh, and the bristles of his gray-red mustache curled down over the cigar like the talons of an eagle. Slowly the red faded from the whites of his eyes. He fixed his gaze dreamily upon the hills across the river. The minutes came and went” (p. 1,250).
I would be doing O. Henry a disservice if I failed to include at least one citation on his favorite subject. To wit:
“ ‘So, as I’ve said, a woman needs to change her point of view now and then. They get tired of the same old sights — the same old dinner table, washtub, and sewing machine. Give ‘em a touch of the various — a little travel and a little rest, a little tomfoolery along with the tragedies of keeping house, a little petting after the blowing-up, a little upsetting and a little jostling around — and everybody in the game will have chips added to their stack by the play’ ” (p. 386).
A word or two of caution to the reader who comes to O. Henry for the first time: cozy up to a good dictionary (I, personally, learned about two hundred new words in this reading); then put your widgets and gadgets away and find a quiet, well-lit place. O. Henry’s stories require intense concentration. The master of the surprise ending may insert a turnabout word or phrase at any point in his narrative or dialogue…you may miss it (as I did many times in spite of reading under the best of all possible circumstances — viz., on a quiet little hill in an out-of-the-way corner of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden)…at which point, you will have lost the entire thread of the story.
And get used to the Latin “viz.” (anglice: ‘namely’). O. Henry uses it over and over again — as he does “table d’hôte” (the rough equivalent of which would be a communal table at a ‘prix fixe,’ or, in other words, a ‘cheap or set meal’). And then, bon appétit! Or rather, bonne lecture!
RRB
10/24/13
Brooklyn, NY
Show Less