41 Stories

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  The Social Triangle

  Tobin’s Palm

  The Last Leaf

  Schools and Schools

  Springtime a la Carte

  Best-Seller

  The Gift of the Magi

  The Green Door

  Transients in Arcadia

  Brickdust Row

  The Enchanted Profile

  The Furnished Room

  Con Men and Hoboes

  Shearing the Wolf

  Hostages to Momus

  A Retrieved Reformation

  The Higher Pragmatism

  Conscience in Art

  The Ethics of Pig

  Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet

  A Tempered Wind

  The Wild West and the Tame West

  Telemachus, Friend

  The Caballero’s Way

  Friends in San Rosario

  The Sphinx Apple

  The Princess and the Puma

  A Chaparral Prince

  The Enchanted Kiss

  The Lonesome Road

  The Hiding of Black Bill

  Hygeia at the Solito

  Our Neighbors to the South - Domestic

  “The Rose of Dixie”

  Cherchez la Femme

  The Fool-Killer

  The Moment of Victory

  Our Neighbors to the South - Foreign

  Two Renegades

  He Also Serves

  The Lotus and the Bottle

  The Shamrock and the Palm

  Shoes

  A Double-Dyed Deceiver

  The Fourth in Salvador

  Afterword

  O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. Young Porter went to work in a drugstore at age fifteen. Later he traveled to Texas to work on a ranch and spent ten years in Austin, where he married, worked as a bank teller, and purchased a weekly newspaper, The Rolling Stone. But the paper failed, and in 1894, Porter was accused of embezzling bank funds. Eventually, he fled to Honduras and returned only in 1897 to be with his dying wife. Committed to a federal penitentiary in Ohio, he began writing under the name O. Henry. Following his release in 1901, he lived in New York City. A prolific writer, often turning out a story a week, he kept his real identity a secret as his fame grew. His first book, Cabbages and Kings, appeared in 1904 and was followed by thirteen other collections. His stories, which have been translated and read all over the world, are so popular that they have never gone out of print.

  Burton Raffel has taught English, classics, and comparative literature at universities in the United States, Israel, and Canada. He is the author of such acclaimed translations as Beowulf; The Essential Horace: Odes, Epodes, Epistles and Satires; The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar; Poems from the Old English; and The Annotated Milton; as well as several critical studies, including Introduction to Poetry and The Forked Tongue: A Study of the Translation Process.

  Laura Furman, professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and a Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of two novels, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. Her fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Southwest Review, Yale Review, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Since 2002, she has been series editor of the O. Henry Prize Stories.

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  First Signet Classics Printing, December 1984

  First Signet Classics Printing (Furman Afterword), July 2007

  109876S43

  Introduction copyright © New American Library, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1984

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04256-4

  Afterword copyright © Laura Furman, 2007

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  Introduction

  Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1862, William Sydney Porter was the son of a neurotic, largely self-trained doctor and a tubercular mother, of good family. His maternal grandfather had been a successful newspaper editor; his mother had a degree from a women’s college. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was three, and his paternal grandmother—and especially his father’s sister—raised the boy. His father drifted into drinking, worked at a perpetual-motion machine, and died in 1886, as much out of contact with the world at large as with his son.

  His grandmother was a firm, outspoken woman who, after her husband’s death, ran a boardinghouse. His aunt ran a small private school where Porter got what education he received; she also pushed him to read and to read well. “I did more reading between my thirteenth and nineteenth years than I have done in all the years since,” he noted, “and my taste at that time was much better than it is now, for I used to read nothing but the classics.... I never have time to read now. I did all my reading before I was twenty.”

  At age 15, he was apprenticed as a pharmacist in a drug store owned and operated by a paternal uncle, and his formal schooling was over. At age 19, he was a licensed pharmacist; within a year, showing signs of the tuberculosis that had killed his mother, he was sent to a sheep and cattle ranch in southwest Texas where outdoor life might arrest the disease. After working on the ranch for two years, he moved to Austin, Texas, worked at assorted jobs, and in 1887 married the daughter of a successful Austin businessman. He had always been interested in drawing and sketching; now he secured a reasonably well-paying post as a draftsman in the Texas Land Office and began to raise a family. His first child, a son, died a few hours after birth; his second child, a daughter, survived her father. His wife became ill with tuberculosis, Porter lost his drafting post, took a job as a bank teller, and tried to establish himself as a humorist, writing both for the Houston Post and also buying a printing press and the rights to a small scandal sheet, promptly renamed The Rolling Stone. It was an eight-page affair, for which he wrote most of the material and did the typesetting and printing, simultaneously keeping his bank post. The magazine did not flourish: Porter slid into a life of dissolution and illicit borrowing from various bank accounts
. His father-in-law repaid his embezzlement, and a jury acquitted him on criminal charges, but the Federal bank examiners moved for a new trial. The Rolling Stone died in 1895, Porter was rearrested in 1896, and promptly fled, first to New Orleans and then to Honduras. He stayed two years. Roughly a year later, learning that his wife was near death, he returned. She died a few months afterward; the next year, 1898, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, where he, in fact, served over three years.

  Jail was deeply traumatic for him, though he received favorable treatment as a pharmacist and was given reasonable freedom to continue writing. No one knows exactly how or why he transformed himself, in those years, into what became his internationally celebrated pen name, O.Henry, nor does anyone know precisely what (if anything) the pseudonym is supposed to mean. Clearly, the important thing is that it is a pseudonym. The use of the name O.Henry was a way of separating himself from much of the reality he had no inclination to deal with. His letters to his small daughter never revealed why he was away from home or, indeed, where he was, but the letters he wrote to his in-laws indicate keen awareness of prison conditions. Though fellow prisoners urged him to write on such topics, he neither did nor would. “I will forget that I ever breathed behind these walls,” he affirmed even before his discharge. His personal disguise, equally clearly, melted into the many disguises and transformations of his fiction, in which from the start nothing was ever exactly what it seemed to be and the laws of causation scarcely seem to hold. Secrets are magical charms in the world of his fiction, as after his release from prison the secret of his criminal conviction became a potentially destructive spell that had to be forever contained.

  O.Henry drew on his own life and the lives of his fellow prisoners in the stories he wrote in those prison years and afterward. But he also taught himself how to transform mundane materials into magical fiction—an art he practiced, thereafter, with immense and quite conscious aplomb. In a restaurant one day, Irvin Cobb, himself a humorist, asked O.Henry how he developed his plots, where on earth he found them all. “Oh, everywhere,” O.Henry is reported to have answered. “There are stories in everything.” He then picked up the menu and, glancing at it, declared, “There’s a story in this.” And he improvised the plot of “Springtime à la Carte,” perfectly typical of the best of his tales.

  And “perfectly typical” is an unusually appropriate term for the hundreds of stories that poured from his pen. No writer of equivalent stature, with the possible exception of Anton Chekhov, has ever written so distinctly to formula, and Chekhov did not write that way for his entire creative life but only at the start. O.Henry’s beginning was his end: It is almost impossible to tell from internal evidence when a particular story was written, nor is there any significant difference in quality. There are good stories and bad ones, and there are superb stories, throughout his work. His many published collections, similarly, are a chronological jumble, for it simply does not matter in what book a story occurs, any more than it matters when it was written. At one point, under contract with a New York newspaper, the World, he turned out a story a week for the paper’s Sunday edition and kept it up for thirty months and over one hundred stories. The results were neither better nor worse than during any other period of the roughly nine years after he left jail. O.Henry made his own conditions: the pressure to write, to publish, to succeed did not come from signing a contract.

  He rapidly became famous, and he began to earn large sums of money. The World paid him $100 a week, a sum probably equal to ten times that amount today. He lived well but almost as anonymously as the way he hid himself behind his literary name. He was deathly afraid of meeting someone from the penitentiary, of being found out, of being exposed as William Sydney Porter, bank embezzler and convict. Cabbages and Kings, his first collection, came out in 1904, and was well received. The Four Million (i.e., the four million residents of New York City at that time), published in 1906, made him famous. From that day to this, his works have never been out of print. Book after book rolled into print; even after his death in 1910, there were stories enough for four more volumes, plus, in 1920 and then in 1936, still further gleanings, largely of very early material.

  It was a literally killing pace, and O.Henry had begun to feel the effects and to slow down by about 1907. He had also managed to marry for a second time, to a childhood sweetheart and spinster who was close to forty and temperamentally about as unsuited to him as he was unsuited to marriage itself. His daughter lived with them briefly, but the marriage fell apart: by 1909 the second Mrs. Porter had gone home to mother, the young Miss Porter had been sent off to school, and O.Henry, weary, as always in debt, was desperately trying to recoup. As always he wrote, and he schemed; fortune beckoned, and he looked the other way while plunging still further into debt and imminent physical collapse, drinking too much, living too high, and yet perpetually hopeful, perpetually dreaming, planning, scrambling. He took money for a novel that was never written and wrote a failed musical comedy instead. He took $500 for the dramatic rights to “A Retrieved Reformation,” instead of writing the play himself, as the producer had wanted. Alias Jimmy Valentine was a tremendous hit, earning more than $100,000 in royalties by the time its first run ended. He drank more and more, wrote less and less, unwilling to admit that the tuberculosis that had killed his mother and his first wife, and which three decades earlier had threatened him, had now caught up to him and was eating his life away. He died sordidly, suffering simultaneously from tuberculosis, diabetes, and an advanced stage of cirrhosis of the liver.

  It would be hard to put it better than Jesse F. Knight has done in a little-known journal, The Romantist:

  O.Henry realized that Romance is not in a specific locale. Romance is not inherent anywhere. Rather, it is within ourselves.... It is how we view life which determines Romance; not life itself.... One of O. Henry’s most remarkable achievements was his successful blending of Romanticism and the modern, industrial, urban city. O.Henry brought Romanticism squarely into the 20th century.

  The realists of his time, Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, tried in their differing ways to confront their world. O.Henry had no great interest in confrontation: what he primarily wanted, and what he created in his fiction, was escape. And yet as Mr. Knight suggests, it is not so simple and straightforward, for one could write a good part of a social history of New York City in the first decade of the twentieth century from his stories alone. Poverty is everywhere, and misery, and death, too. The heroine of “The Furnished Room” has killed herself in poverty and desperation. The hero kills himself, too, once he learns what has happened to her. The hero of “Brickdust Row” discovers, to his horror, what the city can do to young women and then discovers that without having known it, he is what we would today call a slumlord. “It’s too late, I tell you,” he exclaims at the end, realizing that the girl he would like to love has been too badly affected. “It’s too late. It’s too late. It’s too late.” At the end of “An Unfinished Story” not here reprinted, the narrator dreams himself in heaven, being interrogated by an angelic policeman. Is he one of the prosperous lot standing nearby?

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Why,” said he, “they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid ‘em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?”

  “Not on your immortality,” said I. “I’m only a fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.”

  That deft, wry combination of pain and humor is a special and rare accomplishment. To quote Mr. Knight again, the “pain he undoubtedly felt became one of his greatest assets as he projected it through his fiction. He often poked good-natured fun at human follies, but it is a gentle irony born out of affection, out of love for the human race. His humor ... is not corrosive.... [Overall] there is about his fiction a sense of gaiety and lightness, comparable to a Viennese waltz.” He cannot keep himself from seeing, som
ehow, that evil exists, and often triumphs—and not only in cities. “The Caballaro’s Way” is powerful evidence that O.Henry did not unduly romanticize human nature wherever he found it. But one of the major tools he wielded, in fashioning the many forms of escape that he wove so artfully, was humor. He poked fun; he made puns, some of them as outrageous as any execrable pun ever concocted. In “Masters of Arts,” not here reprinted, a con man reproaches an unwilling artist partner. “ ‘Now, sonny,’ he said with gentle grimness, ‘you and me will have an Art to Art talk.’ ” In “Springtime à la Carte,” the story mentioned earlier as having been spun out of a glance at a restaurant menu, a novel by Charles Reade that O.Henry liked is referred to as “the best non-selling book of the month.” In “Seats of the Haughty,” not here reprinted, a con man “hustles away with a kind of Swiss movement toward a jewelry store.” He can get almost as verbally playful as James Joyce, though in a very different cause. “ ‘It’s part of my business,’ ” says a character in “The Man Higher Up,” not here reprinted; “ ‘to play up to the ruffles when I want to make a riffle as Raffles. ’Tis loves that makes the bit go ‘round’ ”—referring, in this last atrocious pun, to the bit with which the burglar bores his way into his chosen victim’s premises.

  This kind of wordplay, to be sure, is the farthest thing from the hack work of which O.Henry is so freely accused. It is true that he wrote a great deal and that he never, so far as is known, revised. He also wrote with great art and with immense zest, which are not qualities associated with hack work. There is sentimentality in much of O.Henry (as there is, it must be noted, in much of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and even Stephen Crane), but there is far more artistic discipline and vivid love of craft than some of his critics are prepared to admit. “The club of realism,” a marvelously apt phrase from “The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock,” ought not to be wielded against O.Henry: He was trying to do something very different, and doing it, much of the time, superlatively well.