The Short Fiction of O. Henry

William Sydney Porter, who wrote as O. Henry, turned out hundreds of short stories in the space of a decade, and this collection gathers a great many of them. His tales range across the shop girls and clerks of New York, the drifters and con men of the American South and West, and the sun-struck banana republics of Central America, where he had spent time as a fugitive. What unites them is a warm eye for ordinary people and the sudden reversal, the twist in the final lines that became his trademark. Sentimental, ironic, and generous by turns, stories such as ‘The Gift of the Magi’ and ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’ have never gone out of print. This free PDF and EPUB edition collects his short fiction in a single volume.