The Selected Stories of O. Henry - Softcover

Henry, O.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1539004643 ISBN 13: 9781539004646

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

Synopsis

These carefully selected tales of O. Henry, more than forty in all, showcase the author's unique storytelling flair.

Treasured for their humor, warmth and clever characterisation, O. Henry's short stories carry a readability which is seldom uncompelling and occasionally outright gripping. Many have shocking endings, with a sudden plot twist turning the reader's perceptions on their head. Most often we join ordinary people working ordinary jobs, who happen to experience something extraordinary.

Wide ranging in scope and setting, O. Henry would choose a variety of locales to situate his stories. Downtown New York, the vast cattle plains of Texas, and everyday small towns serve to vary the backdrop. It is a common theme for either a character, the narration, or both to provide witty asides and wordplay which keep the reader amused.

Compiled after the author's death, this compendium summarises a stunning career in writing, cut tragically short by Henry's early death at the age of forty-seven. Henry's gift for weaving an interesting narrative and situation for characters inside of just a few pages is displayed superbly, making this book both a fine introduction and retrospective to O. Henry's works.

Still fresh and stylistically impressive to this day, O. Henry's short stories are a worthy occupant of any fiction library.

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: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1539004643
• ISBN 13: 9781539004646
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 242