New York: Library of America, 2021
828 pp., $35 (hardcover)
It’s revealing that the prestigious Library of America, which has been republishing the works of the nation’s greatest writers since 1982, has only now gotten around to O. Henry. When he died in 1910, O. Henry—whose real name was William Sidney Porter—was not just a celebrity, adored by fans of all backgrounds, but was considered by readers worldwide as one of the quintessential American authors. Yet the drastic shifts in literature that occurred in the decade after his death seemed to many who outlived him to have effaced everything he represented.
Today, although his influence is still pervasive, probably few have ever read his stories (with the sole exception of the classic “Gift of the Magi”) and fewer still who appreciate the scope of his impact. None of his works appear in the latest Norton Anthology of American Literature, for instance, and the twelve-hundred-plus-page Columbia Literary History of the United States mentions him in only one sentence. One hopes this new collection of 101 tales—including three previously unpublished—will help reignite interest in an author whom literary critic Carl Van Doren called “a connoisseur of adventure whose restless avidity in exploring his field of romance appears in the astounding riches of his invention and illustration.”1
Porter was not the kind of person one might expect to earn such accolades. . . .Born in North Carolina during the Civil War to an alcoholic father and a mother who died when he was three, he grew up to become a pharmacist. When he was twenty, he came down with what he feared was tuberculosis, so he moved to Texas, where the climate was considered healthier. In Austin, he married and became a bank teller, spending his spare hours writing humorous stories. These earned him the attention of a Houston newspaper, and the couple moved there with their daughter in 1895 in hopes that his writing could support the family. But shortly afterward, he was indicted for embezzling from the Austin bank and fled to Honduras immediately before trial. Six months later, when he learned his wife had herself contracted tuberculosis, he returned and was promptly arrested. She died seven months after that, and the following year he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.
It was there that his career as O. Henry began. The first story he published under that name was the tender “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking,” in which a tramp with a criminal record prevents some friends from burglarizing a home simply because the little girl who lives there wished him a merry Christmas (63). “Whistling Dick” has a hint of Victor Hugo’s heroic convict Jean Valjean, as does the thief Jimmy Valentine in “A Retrieved Reformation.” Valentine uses his safecracking skills to rescue a girl trapped in a bank vault, knowing that this will reveal his identity to a nearby detective and, perhaps, lead to his arrest (80). The story plainly echoes the passage in Book V of Les Misérables in which Valjean blows his cover by lifting a wrecked carriage that has trapped the elderly merchant Fauchelevent.
But it is unclear how much O. Henry really drew from Hugo or anyone else, because he resisted being likened to other writers. He especially disliked being compared to Guy de Maupassant, whose brilliant twist-ending style most resembled his own. Notwithstanding his inventive plots, Maupassant was a naturalistic writer whose stories featured prostitutes and addicts, conveying a sense of despair and even nihilism. When asked about the similarities in their techniques, O. Henry shot back, “I never wrote a filthy word in my life and I don’t like being compared to a filthy writer.”2
There is indeed nothing filthy about O. Henry’s world. Although many of his stories feature small-time crooks and are often set in slums, they always express a sense of decency and justice, containing none of the resignation or cynicism that so many writers today mistake for sophistication. On the contrary, even the tales that make the most overt social or political statements—such as “Psyche and the Psyscraper,” which opens with a long reflection on the mind-set of people who look down on man as “but a creeping, contemptible beetle,” or “An Unfinished Story” (omitted from this volume), which likens tightfisted employers to murderers and arsonists—are nonetheless written with a tone of benevolence and good humor, and ultimately celebrate values that matter, such as love, opportunity, and joy (520). In “Unfinished,” for example, the heroine, though poor, is resilient and proud, and refuses the attention of a wealthy boor who tries to take advantage of her. And in “Psyche,” when one character muses to his would-be sweetheart that human affairs seem petty from atop a tall building, she replies, “I think it’s awful to be up so high that folks look like fleas,” and chooses another man, who though small of fortune, has big ambitions (523).
O. Henry stories are not Pollyannaish, but they express what biographer Richard O’Connor calls a sense of “optimism about the eventual success of the American experiment, always implicit even when he described the inequities and injustices of the social system.”3 His witty phrasing and ingenious plots lend a tone of rightness and beauty even to his tragic tales, such as “The Last Leaf,” in which a young woman stricken with pneumonia becomes convinced that her death will come when autumn finally withers the vine outside her window—whereupon an artist friend paints a realistic leaf on the wall to fool her into mustering the strength to recover.
Simply put, O. Henry was a romanticist whose fiction expressed a vision of how the world should be. As Van Doren observed, “his system of morality pervades s whole universe.”4Although his stories are usually lighthearted, they are always governed by a confidence that success is possible, even if it is through mind-boggling coincidences or intricate conspiracies—for instance, in “Mammon and the Archer” (also not included in this collection), in which a rich father helps his son propose to his girlfriend by bribing scores of cab drivers to cause a traffic jam.
Freed early from prison for good behavior, Porter devoted himself to writing full-time in 1901, producing work at the phenomenal rate of a story per week. These included his most famous fiction, such as “Gift of the Magi” and “The Furnished Room” (618, 466). Within three years, he had gained such renown that publishers clamored for a novel. But finding himself unable to write one, he instead combined several sketches, loosely based on his time in Honduras, into a “fix-up”—an interlinked set of stories that resembles a novel—called Cabbages and Kings. It was a clever trick, and it’s regrettable that editor Ben Yagoda has chosen not to include the stories in that order here, or even in chronological order. Instead, he organizes them by the location in which they are set (“West,” “Tropics,” “New York,” and so on), which means readers who start at the beginning will encounter stories written in 1909 before stories written in 1902, and the connections that form the overall narrative of Cabbages and Kings are lost.
Cabbages and Kings was only moderately successful, but Porter’s subsequent volumes, which took the form of ordinary anthologies instead of fix-ups, became best sellers, appearing at the rate of two or even three a year. Most popular was The Four Million, a group of stories set in New York, the title of which was meant as a reply to certain Manhattan socialites who said there were only four hundred people in New York worth knowing. That book and its successors established O. Henry as a sort of poet laureate of the Big Apple, one whose tales articulate the restlessness, resilience, and bustling charm of America’s greatest city.
Then, at the height of success, Porter suddenly died—at forty-seven, of diabetes aggravated by his extreme alcoholism. His whole career had lasted less than a decade. Four years later, World War I broke out, and the spirit of the era he had so perfectly expressed seemed to vanish. Later generations of literary scholars would view his works primarily as historical curiosities.
That cultural shift began with what Van Doren called the “Revolt from the Village,” a literary movement whose practitioners—Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis—replaced O. Henry’s fondness for small-town characters with skepticism and even contempt. This was especially true of Anderson. “There was a notion that ran through all story-telling in America,” he said, “that stories must be built around a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion that they must point to a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens, etc.” Anderson rejected these ideas, instead designing his stories to reveal the “absurd fancies” that “went on in secret within e.”5 His 1919 book, Winesburg, Ohio, imitated the fix-up device of Cabbages and Kings but focused on the perversities, neuroses, and frustrations of the residents (Anderson called them “grotesques”) of a fictional midwestern village. It proved enormously influential and helped drive American literature toward a cynicism from which it has never entirely recovered.
The decades that followed witnessed new waves of naturalism and anti-idealism under authors such as William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Richard Wright, and Arthur Miller. It’s likely that many of their descendants—for instance, Richard Yates, whose 1961 Revolutionary Road put a contemporary spin on Sinclair Lewis; or Nathan Halpern, whose 2020 television series, Tales from the Loop, is modeled on Winesburg, Ohio—are unaware that they work in the shadow of a movement that was reacting against O. Henry.
Other writers, however, took a different view of O. Henry’s romanticism. These included Ayn Rand—who admired his “benevolent, almost childlike sense of wonder” and even tried imitating his style early in her career with stories she signed as O. O. Lyons—and Rose Wilder Lane, who in 1935 published her own fix-up, Old Home Town, as a refutation of Winesburg, Ohio.6 It consisted of what she called “imitation O. Henry” stories, each employing Porter’s trademark twist endings, while exploring the hopes and dreams of the residents of the town in which she grew up.7 Lane initially had supported the Revolt from the Village, but she came to see it as substituting “a thin cynicism for [O. Henry’s] optimism, caricature for s sympathy, a snobbish, faintly disguised detachment for the uniquely American sense of human kinship.”8 She and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, later wrote the Little House series of children’s books in hopes of reviving the can-do spirit that O. Henry and his contemporaries, such as Mark Twain and Willa Cather, represented.
But O. Henry’s most recognizable legacy today is probably found, of all places, in The Twilight Zone. In 1952, Fox Studios released O. Henry’s Full House, a film made up of segments based on Porter stories. Five years later, recognizing that the writer’s brevity and distinctive style fit their needs perfectly, TV producers borrowed the idea. O. Henry Playhouse premiered in 1957, with each half-hour episode based on one of his stories and introduced by an actor portraying the author himself. The same year, another anthology series, Playhouse 90, gave Rod Serling—who had written a radio adaptation of “Gift of the Magi” while in college—his first job as a screenwriter. When he created The__Twilight Zone in 1959, he and his colleagues were quick to employ O. Henry’s tricks, crafting stories with twist endings and portraying a world governed by a (sometimes cruel) spirit of justice. In the decades since, countless writers have looked to The Twilight Zone for inspiration without realizing that they walk a path laid out a century ago by William Sidney Porter.
Library of America editions typically include no literary analysis, so this volume’s editor, Ben Yagoda, mentions none of this history in his notes, although he is currently preparing a separate book chronicling Porter’s life in New York. Instead, the focus here is on the stories, which Yagoda has painstakingly cleansed of the typos that marred their original publications and annotated with helpful explanations of the subtle jokes and references that today’s readers might not get. Although it is regrettable that the volume leaves out some fine O. Henry stories (such as his fascinating “The Lotus and the Bottle”), that is inevitable given the sheer magnitude of the author’s output. And the three previously unpublished stories included here—“Return of the Songster,” “The Ghost that Came to Old Angles,” and “Pursuing Ideals”—contain all the charm and cleverness of his best work.
To the idealist, wrote O. Henry, “The stars were set in the firmament expressly to give soft light to lovers wandering happily beneath them; and if you stand tiptoe some September night with your sweetheart on your arm you can almost touch them with your hand” (525). In the years after his death, the literary world came to spurn such notions on the grounds that real life isn’t like that. But O. Henry—who, as Van Doren said, wrote with “chuckling unconcern for the timid conventions of realism”—was not trying to describe things as they are.9 He was writing about how things ought to be. His fictional world was not meant to represent the literal truth but the profounder truth of worthy values, pursued and fulfilled. The special glow of his prose and the magic of his plots show us the world as it should be—and almost bring it within reach.