The Best American Humorous Short Stories | Page 9

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 balanced by humor. Other stories of his deserving of special mention are: A Corner in Farmers (February, 29, 1908, Saturday Evening Post), A Fortune in Smoke