Selected Stories
Eighty short stories by a master of the genre
O. Henry's comic eye and unique, ironic approach to life's realities are unmatched. These stories—about con men and tricksters and "innocent" deceivers, about fate, luck, and coincidence—have delighted generations of readers. Set in New York and the West, in Central America and the South, they demonstrate O. Henry's mastery of speech and place, and highlight his appreciation of life's quirks.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by…
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July 1, 1993O. Henry is the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910) and the name under which he published all of his work, which includes a novel and some 300 short stories. His talent for vivid caricature, local tone, narrative agility, and compassion tempered by irony made him a vastly popular writer in the last decade of his life. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, to ordinary middle-class parents and worked in an uncle’s drugstore as a youth, becoming a certified pharmacist. Like many southerners after the Civil War, Porter sought his fortune in the West, holding various jobs such as that of a clerk in a land office and a teller at an Austin bank. Charged with embezzlement in 1894,…