Selected stories of O.Henry

Table of Contents

1. The Plutonian fire
2. The princess and the puma
3. By courier
4. The gift of the Magi
5. The love-philtre of Ikey Schoenstein
6. Mammon and the archer
7. The memento
8. Springtime ̉la carte
9. The last leaf
10. The skylight room
11. The Caliph, Cupid and the clock
12. The Count and the wedding guest
13. The romance of a busy broker
14. The higher pragmatism
15. While the auto waits
16. The social triangle
17. After twenty years
18. The green door
19. A lickpenny lover
20. Lost on dress parade
21. Transients in Arcadia
22. Brickdust Row
23. The furnished room
24. Schools and schools
25. The defeat of the city
26. Madame Bo-Peep, of the ranches
27. From each according to his ability
28. The caballero's way
29. Hygeia at the Solito
30. The higher abdication
31. A double-dyed deceiver
32. Friends in San Rosario
33. The hiding of Black Bill
34. Jeff Peters as a personal magnet
35. The man higher up
36. The handbook of Hymen
37. Telemachus, friend
38. The lonesome road
39. A retrieved reformation
40. The Renaissance at Charleroi
41. The thing's the play
42. Tobin's palm
43. A newspaper story
44. Proof of the pudding
45. Confessions of a humorist.

O. Henry originated the humorous, energetic tale that ends with an ironic, even shocking twist. In "After Twenty Years," for example, two boys agree to meet at a particular spot exactly twenty years later. Both are faithful, but in the intervening years one boy has turned into a criminal, the other into a policeman. Behind the rendezvous lurks a powerful dramatic situation with a fascinating moral dilemma--all in a few brief pages.


This is just one of the many literary gems in Selected Stories of O. Henry, a collection of forty-five of O. Henry's most renowned and entertaining short stories. Each one offers insights into human nature and the ways it is affected by love, jealousy, poverty, gentility, and the all-pervading reality of people conning people--themes that ran through the author's own life. Born William Sidney Porter, O. Henry started writing while in prison for embezzlement. Later he moved to New York, and his tales romanticizing the commonplace, particularly the life of ordinary New Yorkers, became highly popular. The most widely read author of his time, O. Henry died penniless but left behind a wealth of short stories that endure as hallmarks of the genre.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14469.Selected_Stories