The Best Short Stories of O. Henry
The more than 600 stories written by O. Henry provided an embarrassment of riches for the compilers of this volume. The final selection of the thirty-eight stories in this collection offers for the reader's delight those tales honored almost unanimously by anthologists and those that represent, in variety and balance, the best work of America's favorite storyteller. They are tales in his most mellow, humorous, and ironic moods. They give the full range and flavor of the man born William Sydney Porter but known throughout the world as O. Henry, one of the great masters of the short story.
O. 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,…
The Gift of the Magi
O. Henry; Cover illustrated by Coralie Bickford-Smith
41 Stories
O. Henry
The Raven and the Monkey's Paw
Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Saki, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, Wilkie Collins,Ambrose Bierce, W. W. Jacobs
The Best Short Stories of O. Henry
O. Henry