: O. Henry
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: Seltzer Books
: 9781455333479
: 1
: CHF 0.10
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 458
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Accord ng to Wikipedia: 'O. Henry was the pen name of American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 - June 5, 1910). O. Henry short stories are known for wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.... Most of O. Henry's stories are set in his own time, the early years of the 20th century. Many take place in New York City, and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses. Fundamentally a product of his time, O. Henry's work provides one of the best English examples of catching the entire flavor of an age. Whether roaming the cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the 'gentle grafter,' or investigating the tensions of class and wealth in turn-of-the-century New York, O. Henry had an inimitable hand for isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of language. Some of his best and least-known work resides in the collection Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town while each advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another in a complex structure which slowly explicates its own background even as it painstakingly erects a town which is one of the most detailed literary creations of the period. The Four Million is another collection of stories. It opens with a reference to Ward McAllister's 'assertion that there were only 'Four Hundred' people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen-the census taker-and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the 'Four Million.'' To O. Henry, everyone in New York counted. He had an obvious affection for the city, which he called 'Bagdad-on-the-Subway,'

HE ALSO SERVES


 

If I could have a thousand years--just one little thousand years--more  of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to  touch the hem of her robe.

 

Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and  garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of  the things they have seen and considered.  The recording of their  tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers.  There are only  two fates I dread--deafness and writer's cramp.  The hand is yet  steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in  the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower  of fortune.

 

Biography shall claim you but an instant--I first knew Hunky when he  was head-waiter at Chubb's little beefsteak restaurant and cafe on  Third Avenue.  There was only one waiter besides.

 

Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of the  Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure- seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl-fisher  in the Arkansas River.  Between these dashes into the land of  adventure he usually came back to Chubb's for a while.  Chubb's was a  port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and  Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to  anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago.  You wouldn't  care for his description--he was soft of voice and hard of face, and  rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a  disturbance among Chubb's customers.

 

One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street  and Third Avenue after an absence of several months.  In ten minutes  we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears  began to get busy.  I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw  Hunky's word-of-mouth blows--it all came to something like this:

 

"Speaking of the next election," said Hunky,"did you ever know much  about Indians? No? I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or  Laughing Water kind-I mean the modern Indian--the kind that takes  Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side in  football games.  The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the  afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up  on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the  ancestral wickiup.

 

"Well, they ain't so bad.  I like 'em better than most foreigners that  have come over in the last few hundred years.  One thing about the  Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own  vices for them of the pale-faces--and he retains all his own virtues.   Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets  'em loose.  But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep  their own vices--and it's going to take our whole standing army some  day to police that gang.

 

"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High jack  Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania  college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent  kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs.  He was  a friend of mine.  I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during  the land boom, and we got thick.  He had got all there was out of  colleges and had come back to lead his people out