O. Henry (1862–1910)

In the 1890s New York socialite Ward McAllister published a list of the 400(ish) most socially powerful people in New York City, stating that they were the only acceptable people. In response, writer O. Henry published a collection of short fiction called The Four Million, the approximate population of New York City at the time, to show that the rest of them mattered too. These 25 stories are the first of what would eventually become several volumes of stories about all different kinds of show more New Yorkers in the 1890s and 1900s.

[Tobin's Palm]: The narrator takes his Irish immigrant friend Tobin to Coney Island to distract Tobin from his missing fiancée, and Tobin gets his palm read. All of the fortune-teller's predictions come true, ending with meeting a man who will give him good luck. The man invites the two back to his house where he lives with Tobin's missing fiancée.
(Note that this story does contain the n-word, though not any particular racist sentiments that I could tell.)
An interesting twist! I didn't love it, but it's so very specific that I can't help but appreciate it. The dialect was a bit hard to understand, though the LibriVox volunteer narrator was fine and managed the Irish/Brooklyn accent I expected.

[The Gift of the Magi]: A poor married couple live in a run-down apartment. Neither has enough money to buy a Christmas present for the other, so separately they each sell something precious to be able to afford a worthy present. She sold her hair to buy him a nice chain for his watch, and he sold his watch (which renders the new chain useless) to buy her nice ornaments for her long hair (which her hair is now too short to use)
Obviously this is a reread for me. I have heard this story more times than I could ever possibly count. I have to be honest....I don't like it. It represents nothing but a waste of money by people who need it very badly, and a lack of communication in their relationship. Maybe I would feel differently if I was reading it for the first time.

[A Cosmopolite in a Cafe]: The narrator meets a real man-of-the-world in a cafe. The cosmopolite goes on and on about how he comes from nowhere but the world and having place to call home besides "earth" is beneath him, until someone in the cafe insults his hometown.
Cute. Reminds me of some people I know.

[Between Rounds]: A married couple are fighting in their home next to a boarding house as a policeman walks by on his rounds. The boarding house owner's son is missing so the whole block stops what they're doing to look for him. He's found sleeping in a corner and everyone resumes what they were doing before, including the couple fighting. The policeman walks past again and comments that the couple must have been fighting for over an hour straight.
Though the married couple fighting and the description of the female owner of the boarding house are pretty sexist, I liked this one overall. The community feeling is very nice.

[The Skylight Room]: You (the narrator) are looking for a room in a boarding house when you meet Miss Leeson, a very poor woman who can only afford the smallest attic room, which has a skylight. She loves to look at the brightest star out of her skylight and has named it "Billy Jackson". Miss Leeson can't afford food and passes out from hunger. A medic arrives and saves her. The medic's name is Billy Jackson
Too trite for my taste. The second-person narration is interesting at first but is dropped almost immediately. The LibriVox narrator for these past 3 stories has a nice voice but she pronounces some words incorrectly, which is distracting.

[A Service of Love]: A married couple of artists can't quite make ends meet by following their passion. The musician wife starts teaching piano lessons and comes home every day with stories about her quirky pupil. The painter husband starts taking sketch commissions from an eccentric man who is from their hometown. They are flush with cash, and neither one had to give up their dream. But it turns out they've each secretly been working in the same laundry facility so that their partner could continue being an artist, and were making up the stories about their patrons
Ooh I loved this one soooo much more than Gift of the Magi. The made-up stories were such a nice touch that made the story fun instead of depressing. Delia getting her hand burnt was a bit sad but it was nice that they were making genuinely a lot of money. They weren't starving and killing themselves working for pennies. They were just each trying to ease a bit of the burden so their partner could be an Artist. This is definitely my favorite one so far.

[The Coming-Out of Maggie]: Maggie is not very pretty or graceful, and always has to go to the weekly dance as a third wheel, until one week she arrives with a handsome man named Terry O'Sullivan. Suddenly all of the other men notice her. Terry is very charming and dances with the girlfriend of the head of the club, who tries to fight him. Terry pulls out a knife, which obviously means that he must be Italian and not Irish. Maggie knew he was Italian the whole time and only brought him to get attention from the other guys, which worked.
There's so much slang in this story that it's almost unintelligible. But I got to learn several new slurs for Italians!

[Man About Town]: The first-person narrator searches all over the city to figure out what a "man about town" is and where he can find one. After a long time searching every neighborhood and talking to all different kinds of people, he gets injured by being hit by a car. In the hospital bed, he reads about the incident in the newspaper, which describes him as a "man about town".
Cute! A little tedious in the middle. Similar to "A Cosmopolite in a Cafe" but reversed.

[The Cop and the Anthem]: A homeless man schemes to commit a minor crime so that he can be sentenced to prison for the winter and get out of the cold. None of his crimes work out because everyone is too nice or just won't call the police on him. The homeless man gives up and decides to get his life together and get a job instead and is then arrested for loitering and sentenced to 3 months in prison.
My dad loved to trot this one out when I was a kid to support his conservative beliefs, so it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I think O. Henry just meant it to be silly but it does invite the interpretation that homelessness is a choice and just a result of laziness.

[An Adjustment of Nature]: Three young poor artists spend all their time at a diner with their favorite waitress. They are concerned that one day a man will come and steal their waitress, which they claim would be against nature since her only nature is to be a waitress. They can't comprehend her existing outside of being a waitress. When a rich man does come to the diner and expresses interest in her, they take him out and get him so drunk he won't remember her. Years later the narrator finds out the companion that was most vehement about the waitress being only suited for waitressing has married her.
Disgusting misogyny, with bonus racism and a slur.

[Memoirs of a Yellow Dog]: A dog hates his owner because she's fat and doesn't do housework or dote on her husband like she's supposed to. Her husband takes the dog for a walk and they decide to run away together.
There's something especially vile about projecting human prejudices onto a dog. I guarantee there is no dog on earth that cares whether their female owner homecooks food like a good housewife or buys it at the deli.

[The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein]: Ikey Schoenstein is a pharmacist who works the nightshift. He's in love with his landlord's daughter Rosy, but she's dating Ikey's friend. The friend asks Ikey to make him a love potion (philtre) to give to Rosy so the two of them can elope, and being a good pharmacist, Ikey does so. But he also tells Rosy's father about the elopement plans so he can stop it. In the morning, after his shift, Ikey learns that Rosy and his friend successfully eloped. The friend realized that he wanted Rosy to love him without a potion so he gave the potion to her father instead.
Mostly the same as An Adjustment of Nature, but slightly less bad since the friend decides to give the female love interest actual agency instead of drugging her.

[Mammon and the Archer]: A nouveau-riche businessman argues with his son about whether money can buy everything. The son says it can't because he is romantically interested in a high-society woman but he won't get to tell her how he feels before she leaves for a tour of Europe. Later, while traveling with the young woman in a carriage, the son accidentally drops a ring his late mother left him and the carriage stops so he can retrieve it. By the time the ring is found, the carriage is stuck in a traffic jam and the young couple have plenty of time to talk about their feelings and get engaged. It turns out the father paid carriage drivers to create a traffic jam around the couple, but it's left ambiguous whether the money or love (as represented by the mother's ring) resulted in the engagement.
"Mammon", in this case, means the worshiping of money, while "the archer" is obviously cupid. This one didn't particularly speak to me, being one of the few stories about someone very rich, but I like that the ending is open to interpretation when most of the stories are not.

[Springtime a la Carte]: Sarah went to school for typing and owns her own typewriter but doesn't have the connections or experience to get a job as a stenographer. She has to move to a smaller apartment and struggles to pay for food. She stumbles upon a lovely restaurant whose menus are in awkward German/English and barely legible, and they hire her to type up their menus for them. Come springtime, she is typing up menus when the newest dish of dandelions reminds her of her lost boyfriend Walter who was supposed to come home before spring but never did. A week later, Walter does come home, he had been looking for her at her old apartment because he didn't get the letter with her new address in it. He had almost given up when he ate at the German restaurant and on the menu he was handed she had accidentally typed "Walter" instead of "dandelions"
I expected this to be too sappy for me, but there's something so precious and perfect about it. It's both modern (accidentally typing a word we were thinking of instead of the word we were supposed to type is even more relatable now than it was back then) and impossibly nostalgic (there was no photocopying so each menu was typed separately and it would not have been worth getting one re-typed to fix a mistake). I think this one is my favorite so far.

[The Green Door]: An adventurous type of man is handed a flyer on the street with the words "the green door" handwritten on the back. Checking the discarded flyers around him, none of them say "the green door". Intrigued, he goes into the building the flyers are distributed in front of, sees a green door, and enters it. He's in the apartment of a young woman who is about to pass out from hunger so he feeds her and listens to her story about being so underpaid that she can't afford food despite having a job. As he leaves her apartment he notices that all of the doors in the building are green. He asks the man giving out the ads about the situation and it turns out that a theater on the next block is putting on a play called The Green Door, and they paid him to sneak a few ads for it into the other flyers he was giving out
The story here is good, but it's couched in a ton of weird philosophy about what it means to be an adventurous man, as well as unnecessary dialect for the Black man handing out the flyers, which nearly ruins it.

[From the Cabby's Seat]: Like all cab drivers, Jerry treats everyone the same, whether they're high class or low, a paying passenger is a paying passenger. He picks up a woman outside of a rollicking wedding, and she says she doesn't have a particular place she wants to go, so he takes her on a scenic drive and then to a very fancy restaurant that is way beyond her means. She has just enough money for one drink, so she enjoys it and then returns to the cab where Jerry is asleep. She wakes him up and they drive off, but when he asks if she has enough money to pay the fare, she does not. Jerry drives her to the police station where he sobers up and remembers that she's his new wife and it was their wedding he picked her up from.
This one is almost really lovely, up until the part where he's so drunk he doesn't even recognize his wife, which is a bit too unbelievable. I think it would have been better if Jerry knew who she was the whole time, but the audience did not. It's funny to think about the contrast between how harmful drunk driving a modern car is compared with drunk driving a horse-drawn carriage which probably only went 8mph and the driver was mostly just there to tell the horses when to stop and go.

[An Unfinished Story]: Dulcie works in a shop and makes $6 per week. The rent on her single room, her meager food, and the newspaper total $4.75 per week. An occasional bit of lace, piece of candy, ride on a carousel, or book eats up all the rest. She's asked out on her very first date by a man she and the other girls at the shop call "Piggy". He lusts after only the skinniest, most malnourished women, and likes to guess how long it's been since they ate. Yet they go out with him because he buys them big, expensive dinners that keep them full all week. As she's getting ready, Dulcie sees on the wall the judgmental gaze of a dashing hero (General Kitchener). She decides that her self-worth is too high to go out with Piggy. In a frame narrative, interrupted by the story of Dulcie, the narrator is in heaven, asked why he should be able to get in. He says he may have murdered orphans and blind men but at least he didn't only pay shop girls $6 a week.
Nice enough, but a bit too sappy. "She might be starving but at least she has her dignity" is not my least favorite O. Henry plot, but it's also not my favorite. The interrupted frame narrative makes this one more confusing than usual.

[The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock]: A prince in a shabby disguise is sitting in the park when he sees a very upset young man on a bench near him. The young man tells the prince that his girlfriend found out he was cheating on her and is deciding if she will forgive him. If she does forgive him, she will hang a white handkerchief from her window, which he can see from the bench, before 8:30. As they are talking, the clock strikes 8:45. The prince tells the young man that clocks are not in charge of us, it is the other way around, and that the young man's life will work out anyway. The white handkerchief is hung out of her window, because the city clock they heard was half an hour fast. Also, the "prince" was actually a delusional bum
Fairly predictable (Am I really expected to believe the shabby-dressed man in the park is a prince?), and also a bit ruined by the man having cheated on his girlfriend.

[Sisters of the Golden Circle]: A woman and her husband are visiting the city from Missouri and taking a ride on a tourist wagon that gawks at millionaires' homes. In front of them is a young woman with fruit in her hat and a man with a tan jacket. The two women exchange meaningful glances and a few brief whispers. Some police are seen outside the wagon and the second man sneaks out of the back of the wagon. The police say they're looking for a thief and he was seen on board, and the woman from Missouri says it was her husband. The man from Missouri has never known his wife to be wrong about anything, so he says it was him. After a few hours of questioning, he's obviously not the thief so he is released. His wife says she fingered her husband instead of the actual thief because the other couple had just gotten married, and she knows what it's like to be a wife.
This was almost good....but why couldn't it just be two women finding solidarity? Or giving a young couple a second chance at a normal life? Did it have to be about being a wife?

[The Romance of a Busy Broker]: A very Important stockbroker thinks about his beautiful, nice-smelling stenographer throughout the day, in between his Important work. His clerk brings him interviewees for a new stenographer, but he rejects them. Why would he want a new stenographer?? At the end of the day, he finally gets the courage to ask his stenographer to marry him but they already got married yesterday but he's so busy he forgot. That's why his clerk brought new stenographers to interview.
Fucked up, but in a very funny way. Similar to "From the Cabby's Seat", it's one thing to forget you've gotten married but completely different to forget you know your spouse at all or have proposed to them.

[After Twenty Years]: A man stands on a street corner, having come to New York to see his old friend Jimmy. They promised they would meet again at that spot in 20 years. The man makes conversation with a passing policeman, explaining why he's there. The policeman leaves and Jimmy finally arrives. They exchange some details about each other, but the man realizes that's not actually Jimmy. Fake Jimmy is a plainclothes police officer that arrests the man for being a thief in his home state. The first police officer was actually Jimmy and he recognized the thief from a wanted poster but didn't have the heart to arrest his old friend himself
Funny! And the shortest one in the collection, I think.

[Lost on Dress Parade]: A man goes out on the town wearing a fine suit, who saves up as much money as he can to purchase a day-pass to a club once every 10 weeks. He sees a pretty but shabby shop girl twist her ankle on the street. He invites her to rest by having dinner with him in a mid-range restaurant (instead of going to the club), and she reluctantly accepts. He tries to impress her with stories about how leisurely his life is since he's very rich and doesn't need to work. At home alone after dinner, he laments that he couldn't tell her the truth. At her home, it turns out she is very rich and had only dressed up as a shop girl. She laments that she can't find a husband because she wants someone hard-working and all the men of her class are too leisurely.
Good! I enjoyed having the woman's point of view.

[By Courier]: A man sees a woman on a bench in the park and looks alarmed. He asks a teen boy to give a message to the woman: he's about to leave the city forever and even though she said not to speak or write to her again, he wants to reconcile. The teen asks the woman, in barely-inteligible teen slang, if she knows the man, and says if not he'll go get the police, but if she does he'll "pass along the song and dance". She doesn't understand the teen slang and technically she never said the man couldn't "song-and-dance" to her again, so she hears the teen out and the couple reconcile.
Very silly!!! It's funny to think that "song-and-dance" was once youth slang, it feels so old now. There's not much twist in this one, most of the humor comes from the slang.

[The Furnished Room]: (CW: suicide) A man rents a room in a boarding house. The housekeeper says she gets lots of artists and performers that rent from her, and the man asks her if she's rented to or seen a singer, but she has not. Alone in the room, the man thinks he can smell his lost girlfriend, a singer. He tears the room apart looking for some sign of her, but he can't figure out where the smell is coming from. He questions the housekeeper again and she recounts everyone who lived there. Giving up, the man seals the room and turns on the gas to kill himself. Meanwhile, the housekeeper discusses the new lodger with her friend and says no, she did not tell him about the young woman who killed herself with the gas in the room last week. The description of the woman that the housekeeper gives matches what we know the man's girlfriend looked like.
Really fucking grim, holy shit.

[The Brief Debut of Tildy]: Tildy works as a waitress at a diner, with another young woman. The other woman gets lots of attention from customers and goes on lots of dates, but Tildy is unattractive and awkward, has never had a date and no one pays attention to her. One day, a man in the diner grabs Tildy by the shoulders, kisses her on the mouth, and walks out. Tildy tells her boss, who gives her a raise to compensate for the sexual harassment. The other waitress befriends her so they can commiserate over getting unwanted attention. Tildy tells her customers, who see her differently and start paying attention to her. A few days later, the man comes back and apologizes to Tildy, saying he was drunk and he shouldn't have done that. Tildy is distraught but the other waitress comforts her and says not to be upset about the man, that if he was a kind man he wouldn't have apologized.
Similar to The Coming-Out of Maggie. Despite the fact that Maggie's situation was her own contrivance and Tildy did not have any agency in hers, this one is a bit sweeter since there's no weird slurs against Italians or knife fights.

Overall I think O. Henry accomplished his goal. These stories are far more diverse and relatable and interesting than anything about the Astors or the Vanderbilts. They are a slice of life of real people’s lives, and almost none of them have a secret army of servants behind them solving all their problems. While none of the stories are about non-white people, and some contain slurs or harmful stereotypes, none of them are overtly racist and it would be easy to adapt or edit those flaws away. There is some significant misogyny in here, with several stories revolving entirely around women not having agency or interiority, and yet the stories that are from a woman’s point of view are some of the loveliest. It makes you wonder what O. Henry could have done if he had tried to write from the point of view of a non-white person. The stories did get a little same-y after awhile, and they all have a very distinct rhythm to them (as you can see from the individual reviews) but I found that very comforting. If I didn’t quite understand what the twist was the first time I knew exactly where to look earlier in the story to find the information I needed.

The book is in the public domain, and I listened to a volunteer-read audiobook on LibriVox.org .This was my first time listening to a LibriVox recording. Some of the narrators were better than others, but they were all fine. show less

Don't read these all in one go!
But do read them, and reread at least a few. I've always loved the ideas, not just Magi, or Ransom of Red Chief, or the Cop and the Anthem... but this time around I was able to pay more attention to the style, the vocabulary, the craftsmanship. And the ideas within the main ideas. For example, The Furnished Room is more than a horror story; it's also a commentary on the segment of society that used boarding houses, both the women who would let the rooms and show more the men who would tenant them.

From 'The Trimmed Lamp'

"We often hear 'shop-girls' spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as 'marriage-girls.'"

(A near perfect commentary on the issue of political correctness, if you ask me.)

From 'Compliments of the Season'

"There are no more Christmas stories to write....
"As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs."

Ok, to modern sensibilities that's a bit off. But read it from the pov of your great-grandfather.... show less

Having reached page 350, I’ve had enough and am giving up. It isn’t that O. Henry is a bad writer, that the stories aren’t well crafted, or that I object to long books in principle. This collection is simply too lengthy. One hundred short stories absolutely bury the reader. It is very difficult to make it through a book of more than 700 pages with no continuity, only a series of fragments. I am not generally a fan of short stories anyway, with the huge exception of those by Borges. I show more was given this book as a present, so felt I had to give it a good try. I have, and it has been quite rewarding, but persisting seems like it would be masochistic.

O. Henry’s stories mostly take place in urban milieus, especially New York, around the time that the 19th century became the 20th. He has an eye for peculiar incidents and interactions, which illustrate how society adapted to unprecedented urbanisation and economic transformation. In particular, I noticed the stories often show how urban spaces provide new opportunities for women whilst also condemning and sometimes endangering them for taking advantage of such opportunities. The differences between experiences of poverty for men and women, as well as single and married women, are adroitly shown. In other words, there is a lot of depressing sexism, including some frankly unpalatable romance and one very unpleasant story that glorifies domestic violence. I wouldn’t say that I found O. Henry’s stories funny as such, although he had some excellent turns of phrase. His wordplay is quite distinctive: ‘Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, and swallowed indignation with the slippery forkfuls.’ He also expanded my vocabulary with words like ‘eleemosynary' (charitable) and ‘cosmopolite’ (citizen of the world).

As little postcards from a vanished past, the stories are for the most part charming and well-drawn. Their quality and tone remains remarkably consistent. They are so brief and so many, though, that the reader is left with little to cling to. If you’re collecting stories that are on average seven pages in length, I really think that thirty or forty would more than suffice for a book. I respect O. Henry’s productivity, though. Very impressive. show less

A collection of 25 O. Henry stories, including Gift of the Magi, set almost entirely among those barely surviving in the rooming houses of New York. Certain racist elements are noticeable, and some of the slang has not been broadcast to posterity, but for the most part these short stories reliably deliver the surprise endings for which O. Henry is best known.