The Best American Humorous Short Stories | Page 9

twentieth century (1900). Not all
are notable for humor; but inasmuch as any consideration of the
American humorous short story cannot be wholly dissociated from a
consideration of the American short story in general, it has seemed not
amiss to mention these authors here. Although Sarah Orne Jewett
(1849-1909) lived on into the twentieth century and Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman (1862- ) is still with us, the best and most typical work of
these two writers belongs in the last two decades of the previous
century. To an earlier period also belong Charles Egbert Craddock
(1850- ), George Washington Cable (1844- ), Thomas Nelson Page
(1853- ), Constance Fenimore Woolson (1848-1894), Harriet Prescott
Spofford (1835- ), Hamlin Garland (1860- ), Ambrose Bierce (1842-?),
Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), and Kate Chopin (1851-1904).
"O. Henry" was the pen name adopted by William Sydney Porter. He
began his short story career by contributing Whistling Dick's Christmas
Stocking to McClure's Magazine in 1899. He followed it with many
stories dealing with Western and South- and Central-American life, and
later came most of his stories of the life of New York City, in which
field lies most of his best work. He contributed more stories to the New
York World than to any other one publication--as if the stories of the
author who later came to be hailed as "the American Maupassant" were
not good enough for the "leading" magazines but fit only for the
sensation-loving public of the Sunday papers! His first published story

that showed distinct strength was perhaps A Blackjack Bargainer
(August, 1901, Munsey's). He followed this with such masterly stories
as: The Duplicity of Hargraves (February, 1902, Junior Munsey), The
Marionettes (April, 1902, Black Cat), A Retrieved Reformation (April,
1903, Cosmopolitan), The Guardian of the Accolade (May, 1903,
Cosmopolitan), The Enchanted Kiss (February, 1904, Metropolitan),
The Furnished Room (August 14, 1904, New York World), An
Unfinished Story (August, 1905, McClure's), The Count and the
Wedding Guest (October 8, 1905, New York World), The Gift of the
Magi (December 10, 1905, New York World), The Trimmed Lamp
(August, 1906, McClure's), Phoebe (November, 1907, Everybody's),
The Hiding of Black Bill (October, 1908, Everybody's), No Story (June,
1909, Metropolitan), A Municipal Report (November, 1909,
Hampton's), A Service of Love (in The Four Million, 1909), The
Pendulum (in The Trimmed Lamp, 1910), Brickdust Row (in The
Trimmed Lamp, 1910), and The Assessor of Success (in The Trimmed
Lamp, 1910). Among O. Henry's best volumes of short stories are: The
Four Million (1909), Options (1909), Roads of Destiny (1909), The
Trimmed Lamp (1910), Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four
Million (1910), Whirligigs (1910), and Sixes and Sevens (1911).
"Nowhere is there anything just like them. In his best work--and his
tales of the great metropolis are his best--he is unique. The soul of his
art is unexpectedness. Humor at every turn there is, and sentiment and
philosophy and surprise. One never may be sure of himself. The end is
always a sensation. No foresight may predict it, and the sensation
always is genuine. Whatever else O. Henry was, he was an artist, a
master of plot and diction, a genuine humorist, and a philosopher. His
weakness lay in the very nature of his art. He was an entertainer bent
only on amusing and surprising his reader. Everywhere brilliancy, but
too often it is joined to cheapness; art, yet art merging swiftly into
caricature. Like Harte, he cannot be trusted. Both writers on the whole
may be said to have lowered the standards of American literature, since
both worked in the surface of life with theatric intent and always
without moral background, O. Henry moves, but he never lifts. All is
fortissimo; he slaps the reader on the back and laughs loudly as if he
were in a bar-room. His characters, with few exceptions, are extremes,

caricatures. Even his shop girls, in the limning of whom he did his best
work, are not really individuals; rather are they types, symbols. His
work was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing, and yet
vaudeville."[9] The Duplicity of Hargraves, the story by O. Henry
given in this volume, is free from most of his defects. It has a blend of
humor and pathos that puts it on a plane of universal appeal.
George Randolph Chester (1869- ) gained distinction by creating the
genial modern business man of American literature who is not content
to "get rich quick" through the ordinary channels. Need I say that I
refer to that amazing compound of likeableness and sharp practices,
Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford? The story of his included in this volume,
Bargain Day at Tutt House (June, 1905, McClure's), was nearly his
first story; only two others, which came out in The Saturday Evening
Post in 1903 and 1904, preceded it. Its breathless dramatic action is
well