One of the most famous pseudonym's in history, the name O. Henry evokes wordplay that is dazzling, inventive, wry, and humorous. This anthology includes forty-one stories that continue to captivate generation after generation of readers, including "The Gift of the Magi", "The Furnished Room", and those which demonstrate the technical genius and wide range of O. Henry's world.

Step into the boarding houses and furnished rooms of New York City, or take a stroll around the park. Observe the tumult and glitter of Broadway on a Saturday night, and browse the silken stockings in Manhattan's most exclusive store. Hop onto the Coney Island ferry to join the lovesick shop-girl, the drunken down-and-out and the secret millionaire in the city's dance of folly and pleasure. Bringing to life the glamour and squalor of the 1900s, O. Henry's unmistakable tales are by turns hilarious or tragic, but always deeply poignant.

O. Henry is the knight of the shop-girl and the waitress; of the wandering, homeless tramp; of poverty-stricken young married folk; of hundreds of lonely human beings who live within the dirty, gloomy wall of two-dollar-a-week boarding house rooms - of the great mass of humanity not included in the "four hundred", the everyday men and women of New York's East Side. The Four Million contains O. Henry's best and most characteristic work: the famous Gift of the Magi, the moving story of a young couple who sacrifice their most prized possessions to buy Christmas presents for each other; Soapy, the brilliant tale of a tramp who desperately attempts to break the law in order to be sent to prison so that he will have a home for the winter months; An Unfinished Story, which is a stern reproval of the employer who underpays his shop-girls - and many others. Unforgettable stories - humorous, poignant, penetrating - by "the most widely discussed and most popular short story writer of his generation." (from the back cover)

The ultimate O. Henry: an annotated edition of classic tales by America's master storytellerO. Henry, born William Sidney Porter, is best known today for his short story "The Gift of the Magi." But that legacy doesn't begin to capture the genius and the extraordinary range of a gifted humorist who deserves to be ranked among the best in our literature, alongside Ring Lardner and James Thurber. As Carl Van Doren wrote in 1917, "no writer in the language seems clever immediately after one has been reading O. Henry."Here are 101 of O. Henry's very best short stories—selected and expertly annotated by best-selling author Ben Yagoda—including not only such favorites as "The Ransom of Red Chief" and "The Last of the Troubadours" but also "The Caballero's Way," which created the character of The Cisco Kid, a murderous desperado in O. Henry's telling, and "The Cop and the Anthem." This volume represents stories from all of O. Henry's collections, including the Honduras...

A trust is its weakest point, said Jeff Peters. "That," said I, "sounds like one of those unintelligible remarks such as, \'Why is a policeman?\'" "It is not," said Jeff. "There are no relations between a trust and a policeman. My remark was an ep

fiction; prose , LCSH

Step into the boarding houses and furnished rooms of New York City, or take a stroll around the park. Observe the tumult and glitter of Broadway on a Saturday night, and browse the silken stockings in Manhattan's most exclusive store. Hop onto the Coney Island ferry to join the lovesick shop-girl, the drunken down-and-out and the secret millionaire in the city's dance of folly and pleasure. Bringing to life the glamour and squalor of the 1900s, O. Henry's unmistakable tales are by turns hilarious or tragic, but always deeply poignant.

O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings. Collected in this book (Golgotha Press, 2010) is a giant anthology of his work, including the stories, some early verses and a few letters.