100 Selected Stories

1 0 0 S e l e c t e d S t o r i e s O HENRY This collection of 100 of O Henry's finest stories is a showcase for the sheer variety of one of America's best and best-loved short story writers. The variety of the stories is amazing; O Henry is as at home describing life south of the Rio Grande as he is chronicling the activities and concerns of 'the four million' ordinary citizens who inhabited turn-of-the-century New York. They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well as the compassion and high humour that have made O Henry's stories popular for the last century. Cover Design by Robert Mathias, Publishing Workshop Cover Illustration Detail from Street Scene in New York, Winter by Hippolyte Victor Valentin Sebron (1801-1879) Chateau Blerancourt, France Courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library, London O HENRY 100 Selected Stories WORDSWORTH CLASSICS This edition published 1995 by Wordsworth Editions Limited Cumberland House, Crib Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9ET ISBN 1 85326 241 2 © Wordsworth Editions Limited 1995 Wordsworth • is a registered trade mark of Wordsworth Editions Ltd All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent Typeset in the UK by R& B Creative Services Ltd INTRODUCTION O HENRY are in the great tradition of American short story writing that stretches from Irving and Poe through to Damon Runyon and even P J O'Rourke. In all, Henry wrote two hundred and seventy stories, and they consist of a rich mixture of semi-realism, sentiment and surprise endings. Though he is fre­ quently thought of as a 'funny' writer, O Henry was, like Runyon, capable of addressing the darker side of life - A Municipal Report and The Furnished Room are two such stories. At the same time, his genius for comic invention flows through the pages of this book, exemplified by the epicurean exchange in Hostages to Momus between the narrator and Caligula Polk. The extraordinary life and experiences of O Henry inform all his stories. He is as at home describing life south of the Rio Grande as he is with 'the four million' - the ordinary inhabitants of teeming, turn-of-the-century New York. Although he has been criticised for relying too much on coincidence and contrived circumstance, O Henry had a genuine sympathy for the downtrodden and oppressed which was unusual in writers of his era. And it is an era that he depicts with remarkable clarity; though some of the reportage and some of the conversations may grate on those whose consciousness is attuned to political attitudes of the late twentieth century rather than the realities of the early twentieth century, the stories are valu­ able examples of how life was lived at a time when slavery and the Indian Wars were only a generation or so in the past. This selection of one hundred of O Henry's stories does not include any from his first collection, Of Cabbages and Kings (1904). Those were all set in South America and have a common thread running through them. This book seeks rather to represen