Read online "The Life and Stories of O. Henry." O. Henry (real name William Sidney Porter) Short stories about Henry

About ten years ago, in St. Petersburg, I met an American. The conversation was not going well, the guests were about to leave, but by chance I mentioned the name of O. Henry. The American smiled, invited me to his place and, introducing me to his friends, said to each of them:

- Here is a man who loves O. Henry.

And they began to smile at me in a friendly way. This name was a talisman. One Russian lady asked the owner: “Who is this O. Henry? Your relative? Everyone laughed, but, in essence, the lady was right: O. Henry, indeed, is a relative for every American. Other writers are loved differently, cooler, but they have a homely attitude towards this. When they call his name, they smile. His biographer, Professor Alfonzo Smith, says that O. Henry attracted conservatives, extreme radicals, maids, society ladies, scribes, and business people. There is no doubt that in a few years he will be one of our most beloved writers in Russia.

O. Henry's real name was William Sidney Porter. Even his admirers did not know this for a long time. He was secretive and did not like popularity. Someone wrote him a letter: “Please answer whether you are a man or a woman.” But the letter remained unanswered. In vain did newspaper and magazine publishers ask O. Henry for permission to print his portrait. He flatly refused everyone, saying: “Why did I invent a pseudonym for myself, if not to hide.” He never told anyone his biography, not even his closest friends. Reporters did not have access to him and were forced to invent tall tales about him.

He never visited either secular or literary salons and preferred to wander from tavern to tavern, talking to the first people he met, who did not know that he was a famous writer. To maintain his incognito, he adopted a common language and, if he wanted, gave the impression of being illiterate. Loved to drink. He felt best in the company of workers: with them he sang, drank, danced, and whistled, so that they mistook him for a factory worker and asked what factory he worked at. He became a writer late; he learned fame only in the forty-fifth year of his life. He was of extraordinary kindness: he gave away everything he had, and, no matter how much he earned, he was constantly in need. In his attitude towards money, he was similar to our Gleb Uspensky: he could neither save it nor count it. One day in New York he stood on the street and talked to an acquaintance. A beggar approached him. He took a coin out of his pocket and angrily thrust it into the beggar’s hand: “Go away, don’t bother me, here’s a dollar for you.” The beggar left, but a minute later he returned: “Mister, you were so kind to me, I don’t want to deceive you, this is not a dollar, this is twenty dollars, take it back, you were mistaken.” O. Henry pretended to be angry: “Go, go, I told you not to pester me!”

At the restaurant, he tipped the footman twice as much as the lunch cost. His wife lamented: as soon as any beggar came to him and lied about his misadventures, O. Henry gave everything to the last cent, gave him his trousers, jacket, and then accompanied him to the door, begging: “Come again.” And they came again.

Supernaturally observant, he allowed himself to be childishly naive when it came to someone in need.
He was a taciturn person, kept his distance from people and seemed stern to many. In appearance he looked like mediocre actor: plump, shaved, short, narrow eyes, calm movements.

He was born in the south, in the sleepy town of Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862. His father was a doctor - absent-minded, kind, small, funny man, with a long gray beard. The doctor was fond of inventing all kinds of machines, from which nothing came of; He was always tinkering in the barn with some ridiculous projectile that promised him Edisonian glory.

Willie Porter's mother, an educated, cheerful woman, died of consumption three years after the birth of her son. The boy studied with his aunt, the aunt was an old maid who beat her students, who, it seems, were worth the rod. Willie Porter was a tomboy like the rest. His favorite pastime was playing Redskins. To do this, he pulled feathers from the tails of live turkeys, decorated his head with these feathers and rushed after the bison with a wild squeal. The role of bison was played by the neighbor's pigs. The boy and a crowd of comrades chased the unfortunate animals and shot at them with a homemade bow. The sows squealed as if they were being slaughtered, the arrows pierced their bodies deeply, and woe to the boys if the owners of the pigs found out about this hunt.

Another of Willie Porter's pastimes was breaking the shells his father invented. The old man was positively obsessed with these shells: he invented the perpetuum mobile, and the steam car, and the airplane, and an apparatus for mechanical washing of clothes - he abandoned practice and almost never left the barn.

One day, Willie and a friend ran away from home to join a whaling ship (he was ten years old at the time), but he didn’t have enough money, and he had to return home as a hare - almost on the roof of the carriage.

Willie had an uncle who was a pharmacist and the owner of a drug store. As a fifteen-year-old teenager, Willie entered his service and soon learned how to make powders and pills. But most importantly, he learned to draw. Every free minute he drew caricatures of his uncle and his customers. The cartoons were evil and good. Everyone predicted Willie's fame as an artist. A drugstore in an out-of-the-way place is not so much a store as it is a club. Everyone comes there with their illnesses, questions, complaints. Best school for a future fiction writer it is impossible to imagine.

Willie read avidly - “The Red-Eyed Pirate”, “The Forest Devil”, “The Jamaican Storm”, “Jack the Ripper” - he read and coughed, because from the age of eighteen he began to face consumption. Therefore, he was very happy when one of the regulars at his uncle’s club, Dr. Hall, invited him to go to Texas for a while to improve his health. Dr. Hall had three sons in Texas - giants, fine fellows, strong men. One of the sons was a judge - the famous Lee Hall, whom the whole district was afraid of; armed from head to toe, he scoured the roads day and night, tracking down the horse thieves and robbers with whom Texas was then infested. In March 1882, Willie Porter came to him and became a cowboy on his farm. He was half-servant, half-guest; he worked like a servant, but was on friendly terms with his masters. Jokingly, I learned how to manage a herd, throw a lasso, shear and bathe sheep, follow horses, and shoot without leaving the saddle. He learned to cook dinner and often cooked, replacing the cook. Wild life Texas was studied by him to the smallest detail, and he subsequently used this knowledge magnificently in the book “The Heart of the West.” He learned to speak Spanish—not just the corrupt Spanish slang they speak in Texas, but the real Castilian dialect.

Then he began to write, but mercilessly destroyed his manuscripts. What he wrote is unknown. Of all the books he read with the greatest interest at that time, it was not novels and stories, but explanatory English dictionary, like our Dahl - best reading for a young writer.

He stayed on the farm for two years. From there he went to Austin, the capital of Texas, and lived there for eleven years. What kind of professions has he tried over these eleven years! He was a clerk in a tobacco warehouse, and an accountant in a house sales office, he was a singer in various churches, a cashier in a bank, a draftsman for a land surveyor, and an actor in a small theater - nowhere did he show any special talents or special passion for the work , but, without noticing it, he accumulated enormous material for the future literary work. It was as if he deliberately avoided literature then, preferring small, inconspicuous positions to it. He had no ambition and always liked to remain in the shadows.

In 1887, he married a young girl, whom he secretly took away from his parents, and soon began writing for newspapers and magazines. But his writings were small - ordinary newspaper trash. In 1894, he became the editor of the local humorous newspaper “Rolling Stone”, for which he supplied drawings, articles, and poems, which were absolutely unremarkable. The newspaper soon withered away.

In 1895, he moved to another town - Gauston, where he edited the Daily Mail, and everything was going well, he was getting out on the literary path - suddenly a thunderstorm broke out over him.

A subpoena came from Austin. William Porter was summoned to court on charges of embezzlement. The judicial investigation found that while he was cashier of the First National Bank, he different time embezzled more than a thousand dollars.

Everyone who knew him considered this accusation a miscarriage of justice. They were sure that, having appeared before the court, he would prove his innocence in half an hour. Everyone was greatly surprised when it turned out that the accused had escaped. Before reaching the city of Austin, he switched to another train and at night rushed south to New Orleans, leaving his daughter and wife in Austin.

We don't know why he ran away. His biographer claims that he was innocent and ran away because he wanted to protect his wife’s good name. If so, then he, on the contrary, should have stayed and proved his innocence in court. The wife would not have to endure so much shame and grief. Obviously, he had reasons to fear trial. The biographer says that the bank administration was to blame for everything: the reporting was carried out negligently, the bosses themselves took two hundred or three hundred dollars from the cash register, without recording this in the office books. There was monstrous chaos in the books; the cashier who had worked at this bank before Porter was so confused that he wanted to shoot himself. No wonder Porter got confused too. Who knows: maybe, taking advantage of the availability of money, he himself borrowed a hundred or two dollars from the cash register two or three times, with sincere confidence that he would put these dollars back in the coming days. The biographer claims that he was absolutely innocent, but why did he run then?

From New Orleans, he made his way on a cargo ship to Honduras and, arriving at the pier, felt safe. Soon he saw that another steamer was approaching the pier and a very strange man in a tattered tailcoat and a dented top hat ran out like an arrow. Ballroom clothes, unsuitable for a ship. It was clear that the man had boarded the ship in a hurry, without having time to change clothes, straight from the theater or from a ball.

-What made you leave so hastily? - the cashier who ran away asked him.

“The same as you,” he replied.

It turned out that the gentleman in the tailcoat was Al. Jennings, a notorious outlaw, was the leader of a gang of train thieves who terrorized the entire southwest with their daring thefts. The police tracked him down and he was forced to flee Texas so quickly that he didn't even get a chance to change his clothes. With him was his brother, also a thief, also in a top hat and tails. William Porter joined the fugitives, and the three of them began to circle around South America. That's when knowledge came in handy Spanish. They ran out of money, they fell off their feet from hunger. Jennings suggested robbing a German bank, a sure thing, the spoils would be split equally.
— Do you want to work with us? - he asked William Porter.

“No, not really,” he answered sadly and politely.

These forced wanderings around South America were later useful to Porter. If he had not fled from trial, we would not have had the novel “Kings and Cabbage,” which was influenced by close acquaintance with the banana republics of Latin America.

At this time, his wife was sitting in the city of Austin, without money, with a small daughter, sick. He invited her to come to the Republic of Honduras, but she was very ill and could not take such a journey. She embroidered some kind of scarf, sold it and, using the first proceeds, bought a bottle of perfume for her fugitive husband, and sent him into exile. He had no idea that she was seriously ill. But when he was informed about this, he decided to put himself in the hands of the judicial authorities, go to prison, just to see his wife. So he did. In February 1898 he returned to Austin. He was tried, found guilty - and during the trial he was silent, did not say a word in his defense - and was sentenced to five years in prison. The fact that he was on the run only added to the guilt. He was taken into custody and sent to Ohio, to the city of Colombos, to a penal prison. The conditions in this prison were terrible. In one of his letters, William Porter wrote:
"I never thought that human life such a cheap thing. People are looked at as animals without a soul and without feelings. The working day here is thirteen hours, and whoever fails to do his homework is beaten. Only a strong man can endure the work, but for most it is certain death. If a person falls down and cannot work, they take him to the cellar and send such a strong stream of water into him that he loses consciousness. Then the doctor brings him to his senses, and the unfortunate man is hung by his hands from the ceiling, he hangs on this rack for two hours. His feet barely touch the ground. After this, he is again driven to work and if he falls, he is placed on a stretcher and carried to the infirmary, where he is free to either die or recover. Consumption is a common thing here - it’s like having a runny nose. Twice a day, patients come to the hospital - from two hundred to three hundred people. They line up and walk past the doctor without stopping. He prescribes medicine - on the go, on the run - one after another, and the same line moves towards the prison pharmacy. There, in the same manner, without stopping - on the move, on the run - patients receive medicine.

I tried to come to terms with prison, but no, I can’t. What binds me to this life? I am capable of enduring any kind of suffering in the wild, but I no longer want to drag out this life. The sooner I finish it, the better it will be for me and for everyone.”

That was, it seems, the only case when this strong and secretive man expressed his feelings out loud and complained about his pain.

When asked in prison what he did outside, he replied that he was a reporter. The prison did not need reporters. But then he caught himself and added that he was also a pharmacist. It saved him; he was placed at the hospital, and soon he discovered such talents that both doctors and patients began to treat him with respect. He worked all night long, preparing medicines, visiting the sick, helping prison doctors, and this gave him the opportunity to get to know almost all the prisoners and collect enormous material for his future books. Many criminals told him their biography.
In general, life seemed to take special care to prepare him as a fiction writer. If he had not been in prison, he would not have written one of his best books, The Gentle Grafter.

But his knowledge of life did not come cheap. In prison, he was especially tormented not by his own, but by the torment of others. He describes with disgust the cruel regime of the American prison:

“Suicides are as commonplace with us as picnics are with you. Almost every night the doctor and I are called to some cell where one or another prisoner has tried to commit suicide. This one cut his throat, this one hanged himself, this one poisoned himself with gas. They think through such undertakings well and therefore almost never fail. Yesterday an athlete, a boxing specialist, suddenly went crazy; Of course, they sent for us, for the doctor and for me. The athlete was so well trained that it took eight people to tie him up.”

These horrors, which he observed day after day, painfully worried him. But he persevered, did not complain, and sometimes managed to send cheerful and frivolous letters from prison. These letters were intended for his little daughter, who was not supposed to know that her dad was in prison. Therefore, he took every precaution to ensure that his letters to her were not gloomy:

“Hello, Margaret! - he wrote. - Do you remember me? I am Murzilka, and my name is Aldibirontifostifornikofokos. If you see a star in the sky and before it sets, you manage to repeat my name seventeen times, you will find a diamond ring in the first footprint of a blue cow. A cow will walk in the snow - after a blizzard - and crimson roses will bloom on tomato bushes all around. Well, goodbye, it's time for me to leave. I ride a grasshopper."

But no matter how hard he tried to seem carefree, melancholy and anxiety often slipped through these letters.

In prison, he unexpectedly met with his old acquaintance, the railway robber Al. Jennings. Here they became even closer, and Jennings, under the influence of Porter, became a different person. He abandoned his profession and also went literary road. He recently published his prison memoirs about O. Henry, an entire book in which he described very soulfully the moral torment O. Henry experienced in prison. About prison procedures Al. Jennings recalls with fury. All criticism unanimously recognized that this thief is an excellent writer, that his book is not only a curious human document, but also an excellent work of art. By the way, Al. Jennings says that in prison there was a remarkable burglar of fireproof cash registers, an artist in his field, who was so brilliant at opening any locked iron cash register that he seemed like a miracle worker, a wizard, an unearthly being. This great artist languished in prison - melted like a candle, yearning for his favorite business. And suddenly they came to him and said that somewhere in some bank there was a cash desk that even the judicial authorities were not able to open. It needs to be opened, there are no keys, and the prosecutor decided to call the brilliant prisoner from prison to assist the judicial authorities. And he was promised freedom if he opened this cash register. One can imagine how inspired and passionately the talented burglar attacked the cash register, with what ecstasy he crushed its iron walls, but as soon as he opened it, the ungrateful authorities forgot about their promise and drove him back to prison. The unfortunate man could not bear this mockery, he finally collapsed and withered away.

Porter subsequently depicted this episode in his famous story "A Retrieved Reformation", but famously changed the ending. The prison authorities in the story are kinder than they were in reality.

He was released early due to good behavior in prison. Good behavior mainly consisted in the fact that, being a prison pharmacist, he did not steal government alcohol - a virtue unprecedented in the annals of prison pharmacies.

After leaving prison, he took up writing seriously for the first time in his life. Already in prison, he sketched something, and now he got down to work in earnest. First of all, he appropriated the pseudonym O. Henry (the name of the French pharmacist Henri), under which he completely hid from everyone. He avoided meeting his former acquaintances; no one had any idea that a former convict was hiding under the pseudonym O. Henry. In the spring of 1902, he first came to New York. He was forty-one years old. Until now, he had lived only in the provinces in the south, in sleepy and naive towns, and the capital enchanted him. Days and nights he wandered the streets, insatiably absorbing the life of the great city. He fell in love with New York, became a New York poet, and explored every corner of it. And millionaires, and artists, and shopkeepers, and workers, and policemen, and cocottes - he recognized them all, studied them, and brought them to his pages. His literary productivity was colossal. He wrote about fifty stories a year - laconic, clear, extremely saturated with images. His stories appeared week after week in the World newspaper and were received with great enthusiasm. There has never been a writer in America who has brought the short story technique to such perfection. Each story by O. Henry is 300 - 400 lines, and in each there is a huge, complex story - many superbly outlined faces and almost always an original, intricate, intricate plot. Critics began to call him “the American Kipling”, “the American Maupassant”, “the American Gogol”, “the American Chekhov”. His fame grew with each story. In 1904, he collected his stories depicting South America into one volume, bound them on a quick fix with a funny plot - and published it under the guise of the novel “Kings and Cabbage”. This was his first book. There is a lot of vaudeville in it, deliberately staged, but it also contains southern mountains, and the southern sun, and the southern sea, and the genuine carefreeness of the dancing, singing south. The book was a success. In 1906, O. Henry’s second book, “Four Million,” appeared, all dedicated to his New York. The book opens with a remarkable preface, which has now become famous. The fact is that New York has its own aristocracy, the money one, who live a very secluded life. It is almost impossible for a mere mortal to penetrate her circle. It is small in number, no more than four hundred people, and all the newspapers grovel before it. O. Henry did not like this, and he wrote:

“Recently someone has taken it into his head to assert that there are only four hundred people worthy of attention in the city of New York. But then another, smarter one came along - a census compiler - and proved that there were not four hundred such people, but much more: four million. It seems to us that he is right, and therefore we prefer to call our stories “Four Million”.

New York then had four million inhabitants, and all these four million seemed equally worthy of attention to O. Henry. He is the poet of four million; that is, the entire American democracy. After this book, O. Henry became famous throughout America. In 1907 he published two books of stories: "The Seasoned Lamp" and "The Heart of the West"; in 1908 there were also two - “Voice of the City” and “Delicate Rogue”; in 1909, again two - “Roads of Rock” and “Privileges”, in 1910 again two - “Exclusively on Business” and “Whirlpools”. Scripture short stories did not satisfy him, he planned great novel. He said: “Everything I’ve written so far is just self-indulgence, a test of the pen, compared to what I’ll write in a year.” But a year later he was unable to write anything: he was overtired, began to suffer from insomnia, went south, did not recover, and returned to New York completely broken. He was taken to the Polyclinic on Thirty-fourth Street. He knew that he was going to die, and he spoke about it with a smile. In the clinic, he joked, lay in full consciousness - clear and joyful. On Sunday morning he said: “Light a fire, I do not intend to die in the dark,” and a minute later he died - on June 5, 1910.
A description of O. Henry as a writer will be given in the coming issues of “Modern West”, when the Russian reader becomes more familiar with his works.

K. Chukovsky

1 O. Henry Biography, by Alphonso Smith, Roe Professor of English at the University of Virginia Garden City, N.-Y., and Toronto.

Abel Startsev

The Life and Stories of O. Henry

A. Startsev. Life and stories of O. Henry // O. Henry. Collected works in three volumes. T. 1. - M.: Pravda, 1975. - P. 3-34.

O.Henry. The name is known to more than one generation of readers. The most popular American humorist of the beginning of the century and a master storyteller, one of the luminaries of this genre, which has a long tradition in US literature.

Moreover, although O. Henry’s stories have been and are being read by millions, his place in the history of American literature cannot be called secure. Literary historians differ in their opinions about him. Especially when it comes to assessing his work next to the powerful flow of socially rich, critical-realist American literature of those years, with the late Twain and the young Dreiser, Jack London and Upton Sinclair.

No matter how you decide this issue - we will touch on it later - it remains indisputable that the life and stories of O. Henry, taken as a whole - his work, his writing path, his fate - form a bright and remarkable page in the history of American culture at the beginning of the 20th century.

William Sidney Porter, who wrote under the pseudonym O. Henry, was born in 1862 in the southern United States, in Greensboro (North Carolina) in the family of a village doctor. He was left without a mother early; After the death of his wife, the father soon became an alcoholic and gave up his medical practice. At the age of fifteen, the boy left school and became an apprentice at a pharmacy store, where he received the profession of a pharmacist.

In 1882, he left for Texas and lived for two years in the steppe, on a cattle ranch, communicating with cowboys and the motley wandering people who inhabited at that time this little-inhabited outskirts of the United States. Having improved his health - this was one of the goals of his stay at the ranch - young Porter in 1884 moved to live in Austin, a small town, the capital of Texas. For twelve years he was a citizen of Austin, working first as a clerk-draftsman in the land office, later as an accountant and cashier in an Austin bank. He devoted a lot of time to self-education and was popular in society as an entertaining conversationalist and a keen cartoonist. At the same time, Porter published his first literary experiments, which showed his undeniable comedic talent. In 1894-1895 he published the humorous weekly Rolling Stone in Austin, and later, in 1895-1896; wrote a feuilleton for the weekly Post newspaper, published in the neighboring Texas city of Houston.

At the end of 1894, a bank audit discovered a shortfall of five thousand dollars, and Porter lost his position at the bank. Some of the writer's biographers believe that he was guilty of nothing more than negligence - the bank's reporting was carried out in a disorderly manner. Others believe that during a period of particularly severe financial difficulties caused by the costs of publishing Rolling Stone, he arbitrarily took money from bank funds and failed to make up the shortfall.

At first it seemed that Porter would be able to avoid prosecution, but in February 1896 he was arrested. Released with an obligation to appear in court on charges of embezzlement of bank money, panic-stricken. Porter secretly traveled to New Orleans and from there fled to Honduras - in Central America - outside the jurisdiction of the US judiciary.

Porter lived in Honduras for about a year. He met another American there, also a fugitive from the law. This young Southerner, Al Jennings, a train raider and scion of a bankrupt plantation family, subsequently published an important memoir of his writer friend, O. Henry is at the bottom."

Porter remained in Central America until news of the fatal disease wives. He returned home, surrendered to the authorities, was released on bail pending trial, buried his wife, and was then sentenced to five years in prison in February 1898.

Porter’s prison years became known from the already mentioned memoirs of Jennings, which appeared after his death (they met again in prison). O. Henry himself did not say a word about the “dead house” until the end of his life. He served his sentence in Columbus, Ohio, a convict prison under a regime whose description in Jennings (and in some of O. Henry's discovered letters to his family) brings to mind the diaries of prisoners in later prisons of Hitler's Germany. The convicts were exhausted with backbreaking work, starved, brutally tortured, and beaten to death if they disobeyed.

Porter was saved by his knowledge of pharmacy, which provided him with a privileged position as a night pharmacist at the prison hospital. He was spared physical torment, but due to the nature of his work, he witnessed most of the tragedies that occurred in the prison.

Porter's sentence was reduced "for good behavior." In the summer of 1901, he was released after being in prison for more than three years.

While still in prison, Porter managed to release and publish three stories, and he decided to become a professional writer. After leaving prison, he soon moved to New York, established contacts with editors and, settling on the pseudonym O. Henry, became known by this name to the general reading public.

Eight years of intense literary work follow. At the end of 1903, O. Henry signed a contract with the largest circulation New York newspaper, The World, for fifty-two Sunday stories a year at a price of $100 “a piece.” He also collaborates in other literary publications. In 1904 he published sixty-six stories and in 1905 - sixty-four. During this period, he worked as if on a literary conveyor belt. The memoirist remembers O. Henry sitting at his desk, finishing two stories at once, and the editorial artist eagerly waiting for him to start illustrating. For all O. Henry's ingenuity, he lacks plots, and he sometimes “buys” them from friends and acquaintances.

The work of these years, apparently, exceeded his strength. Subsequently, the pace of O. Henry's writing activity noticeably weakens.

In total, O. Henry's literary heritage includes over two hundred and fifty stories. His books were published in the following sequence: “Kings and Cabbage” (1904), “Four Million” (1906), “The Heart of the West” (1907), “The Burning Lamp” (1907), “The Voice” big city"(1908), "The Noble Rogue" (1908), "The Roads of Fate" (1909), "To Choose" (1909), " Business people"(1910), "Rotating" (1910) and posthumously three more: "A Little Bit of Everything" (1911), "Under a Lying Stone" (1912) and "Remains" (1917). In 1912-1917, three collected works of O. Henry were published. Subsequently, his uncollected stories and early humoresques were published several more times.

Impractical, with the characteristic skills of a bohemian in everyday life, O. Henry failed to extract from his literary success monetary benefit. He spent the last months of his life alone in a hotel room, undermined by illness and alcoholism, in need of money and no longer able to work. He died in a New York hospital on June 6, 1910, at the age of 48. O. Henry shunned literary dating, and some of the American writers who came to the funeral service saw their brother for the first time only in the coffin.

O. Henry's stories can be divided into two main groups. The first of them includes the New York cycle (about one and a half hundred short stories), united by the location of action and the fact that the characters in it are “four million” (as the writer calls the population of this largest American city, - from street beggars to stock exchange kings). The second - smaller - group includes stories set in the South and West of the United States, sometimes in South America. Characters they feature cowboys, bandits and all sorts of tramps and rogues.

Somewhat apart, but in a number of ways similar to the second group of stories, stands the story (chain of short stories) “Kings and Cabbages”, the setting of which is a certain collective and conventionally depicted state in Central America.

Distinctive features All of O. Henry's works are characterized by pronounced dynamism of composition and humor.

The dynamism of the stories is aggravated by the characteristic escalation of the plot, in which the usual or considered usual logic of events is confused, violated, and the reader moves from one surprise to another in order to be “deceived” by a false denouement and then stunned by another, final one, which was difficult to predict from the initial course of action or even completely impossible. This is the structure of the vast majority of O. Henry's stories.

O. Henry's humor is characteristic of his work as a whole. Most of stories based on comic situation. But even in those cases where the story is not humorous in the proper sense, humor is present in the language of the characters, in the stage directions and comments of the author, and in the very construction of the plot, the puzzlingness of which is also, as a rule, endowed with a humorous function.

The success of O. Henry's stories in the United States and around the world was primarily the success of a humorous storyteller. A playful style of storytelling, the ability to find an entertaining and funny side in any seemingly unremarkable everyday phenomenon, an inexhaustible supply of jokes and puns, and sparkles of satire characterize almost every page of O. Henry.

O. Henry's humorous art is rooted in the American tradition. One of his first humoresques, “I'm Interviewing the President,” could have come from the pen of the young Twain. Another, written during the same early Texas period, The Mystery of Pecheux Street, closely resembles Bret Harte's literary parodies.

O. Henry's mocking and belittling humor is characteristic of the American tradition as a whole. Originating back in feudal Europe, it was at the beginning the humor of a commoner ridiculing the privileges and pretensions of an aristocrat; in anti-feudal America, it took root and was “domesticated.” This line of American humor received its highest, consistently democratic expression in the work of Mark Twain.

The story of the dirty ten

Money talks. But you might think that in New York the voice of an old ten-dollar bill sounds like a barely audible whisper? Well, great, if you like, ignore the autobiography of a stranger told sotto voce. If your ear loves the roar of John D.'s checkbook coming from a megaphone driving around the streets, it's up to you. Just don’t forget that even a small coin sometimes doesn’t fit into your pocket for a word. The next time you slip an extra silver quarter to the grocery clerk so that he can weigh you out with the owner's goods, first read the words above the lady's head. A caustic remark, isn't it?

I am a 1901 ten dollar bill. You may have seen these in the hands of one of your friends. On the front I have a picture of the American bison, mistakenly called buffalo by fifty or sixty million Americans. On the sides are the heads of Captain Lewis and Captain Clark. From the back side in the center of the stage stands, gracefully perched on a greenhouse plant, either Liberty, or Ceres, or Maxine Elliott.

For information about me, please contact: paragraph 3. 588, amended bylaws. If you decide to change me, Uncle Sam will put ten ringing full-weight coins on your counter - really, I don’t know whether they are silver, gold, lead or iron.

I'm telling the story a little confusingly, will you forgive me - forgive me? I knew it, thank you - after all, even a nameless bill evokes a kind of servile awe, a desire to please, doesn’t it? You see, we, the dirty money, are almost completely deprived of the opportunity to polish our speech. In my life I have never met an educated and well-mannered person whose ten would linger for longer period than it takes to run to the nearest grocery store. For a six-year-old, I have a very sophisticated and animated manner. I repay my debts as regularly as those who see off a dead person in last way. I have served so many masters! But I once had the opportunity to admit my ignorance, and to whom? In front of an old, shabby and unkempt five - a silver certificate. We met her in a thick, foul-smelling butcher's wallet.

Hey, you, daughter of an Indian chief, I say, stop groaning. Don’t you understand that it’s time to withdraw you from circulation and print again? Only released in 1899, but what do you look like?

You apparently think that since you are a buffalo, you are supposed to chatter incessantly,” responded the five. - And you would be worn out if you were kept under a fildepers and a garter all day, when the temperature in the store does not drop a degree below eighty-five.

“I haven’t heard of such wallets,” I said. -Who put you there?

Saleswoman.

What is a saleswoman? - I was forced to ask.

Your sister will know this no earlier than their sister’s golden age begins,” answered the five.

Look, lady! She doesn't like fildepers. But if they stuck you behind a piece of cotton, as they did with me, and pestered you all day with factory dust, so that this lady with a cornucopia painted on me even sneezed, what would you sing then?

This conversation took place the day after I arrived in New York. I was sent to a Brooklyn bank by one of their Pennsylvania branches in a pack of dozens just like me. Since then, I have never had the opportunity to become acquainted with the wallets that my five-dollar and two-dollar interlocutors were in. They hid me only behind silk ones.

I was lucky. I didn't sit still. Sometimes I changed hands twenty times a day. I knew the underside of every deal; Again, I took care of every pleasure of my hosts. On Saturdays I was invariably dumped on the counter. Tens are always thrown around, but bills of a dollar or two are folded into a square and modestly pushed towards the bartender. Gradually, I got a taste for it and strove to either sip the whiskey or lick the martini or Manhattan that had spilled there from the counter. One day, a peddler driving a cart along the street put me in a plump, greasy packet, which he carried in his overalls pocket. I thought I would have to forget about the real appeal, since the future owner of the general store lived on eight cents a day, limiting his menu to dog meat and onions. But then the peddler somehow made a mistake by placing his cart too close to the intersection, and I was saved. I am still grateful to the policeman who helped me out. He changed me in a tobacconist's shop near the Bowery, where gambling was going on in the back room. And the chief of the police station, who himself was lucky that evening, took me out into the world. A day later, he got me drunk at a restaurant on Broadway. I was also sincerely glad to be returning to my native land, like one of the Astors when he sees the lights of Charing Cross.

The Dirty Ten don't have to sit around on Broadway. Once they called me child support, folded me up and put me in a suede wallet full of dimes. They boastfully recalled the stormy summer season in Osining, where the owner's three daughters kept fishing out one of them for ice cream. However, these infantile revelries are simply a storm in a teacup when compared with the hurricanes to which banknotes of our denomination are subjected during the menacing hour of increased demand for lobsters.

The first time I heard about dirty money was when the charming youngster Wang Whoever dumped me and several of my girlfriends in exchange for a handful of chips.

About midnight, a rollicking and burly fellow with the fat face of a monk and the eyes of a janitor who had just received a raise, rolled me and many other banknotes into a tight roll - a “piece”, as the money polluters say.

Write down five hundred for me,” he said to the banker, “and see that everything is as it should be, Charlie.” I want to walk through a wooded valley while the moonlight plays on a rocky cliff. If any of us get into trouble, keep in mind that in the upper left compartment of my safe there are sixty thousand dollars, wrapped in a humorous magazine supplement. Keep your nose to the wind, but don't waste your words. Bye.

I found myself between two twenties - gold certificates. One of them told me:

Hey, you "new" old lady, you're in luck. You'll see something interesting. Today Old Jack is going to turn all the Beefsteak into crumbs.

Amazing

We know a man who is perhaps the most witty of all thinkers ever born in our country. His way of logically solving a problem almost borders on inspiration.

One day last week his wife asked him to do some shopping and, considering that with all the power logical thinking, he is quite forgetful of everyday little things, I tied a knot in his scarf. Around nine o'clock in the evening, rushing home, he accidentally took out a handkerchief, noticed a bundle and stopped dead in his tracks. At least kill him! - I couldn’t remember for what purpose this knot was tied.

We'll see, he said. - The knot was made so that I would not forget. So he is a forget-me-not. Forget-me-not is a flower. Yeah! Eat! I have to buy flowers for the living room.

The powerful intellect did its job.

Summoning a Stranger

He was tall, angular, with sharp gray eyes and a solemnly serious face. The dark coat he was wearing was buttoned up with all the buttons and had something of a priestly cut in its cut. His dirty reddish trousers hung loosely, not even covering the tops of his shoes, but his tall hat was extremely impressive, and in general one would have thought that he was a village preacher on a Sunday walk.

He drove while sitting in a small cart, and when he reached a group of five or six people sitting on the porch of a post office in a small Texas town, he stopped his horse and got out.

My friends,” he said, “you all look like intelligent people, and I consider it my duty to say a few words regarding the terrible and shameful state of things that is observed in this part of the country. I refer to the nightmarish barbarity that has recently been displayed in some of the most cultured cities in Texas, when human beings, created in the image and likeness of the Creator, were subjected to brutal torture, and then brutally burned alive in the most crowded streets. Something needs to be done to remove this stain from clean name your state. Don't you agree with me?

Are you from Galveston, stranger? - asked one of the people.

No sir. I am from Massachusetts, the cradle of freedom of the unfortunate Negroes and the nursery of their most ardent defenders. These bonfires of men make us cry tears of blood, and I am here to try to awaken compassion in your hearts for your black brothers.

And you will not repent of calling upon fire to bring about the painful administration of justice?

Not at all.

And you will continue to subject blacks to a terrible death at the stake?

If circumstances force it.

In that case, gentlemen, since your determination is unshakable, I want to offer you several gross matches, cheaper than which you have never seen before. Take a look and see for yourself. Full guarantee. They do not go out in any wind and ignite on anything: wood, brick, glass, cast iron, iron and soles. How many boxes would you like, gentlemen?

The Colonel's Romance

They sat by the fireplace smoking pipes. Their thoughts began to turn to the distant past.

The conversation touched on the places where they spent their youth, and the changes that the passing years brought with them. All of them had lived in Houston for a long time, but only one of them was a native of Texas.

The colonel came from Alabama, the judge was born on the swampy banks of the Mississippi, the grocer saw the light of day for the first time in frozen Maine, and the mayor proudly declared that his homeland was Tennessee.

Have any of you guys gone home on leave since you moved here? - asked the colonel.

It turned out that the judge had been home twice in twenty years, the mayor once, and the grocer never.

It's a funny feeling, said the Colonel, to visit the places where you grew up after an absence of fifteen years. Seeing people you haven't seen for so long is like seeing ghosts. As for me, I visited Crosstree, Alabama, exactly fifteen years after I left there. I will never forget the impression this visit made on me.

There once lived in Crosstree a girl whom I loved more than anyone in the world. One fine day I slipped away from my friends and headed to the grove where I had once often walked with her. I walked along the paths where our feet walked. The oak trees on both sides remained almost unchanged. The little blue flowers could have been the same ones that she wove into her hair when she came out to meet me.

We especially loved walking along a row of thick laurels, behind which a tiny stream gurgled. Everything was exactly the same. No change tormented my heart. The same huge sycamores and poplars towered above me; the same river ran; my feet walked along the same path along which we often walked with her. It seemed that if I waited, she would definitely come, walking lightly in the darkness, with her star eyes and chestnut curls, as loving as ever. It seemed to me then that nothing could separate us - no doubt, no misunderstanding, no lie. But - who can know?

I reached the end of the path. There was a large hollow tree in which we left notes for each other. How many sweet things this tree could tell, if only it could! I thought that after the clicks and blows of life, my heart had hardened - but it turned out that this was not the case.

I looked into the hollow and saw something white in its depths. It was a folded piece of paper, yellow and dusty with age. I unfolded it and had difficulty reading it.

"My beloved Richard! You know that I will marry you if that is what you want. Come early this evening and I will give you an answer better than in the letter. Yours and only yours Nelly."

Gentlemen, I stood there holding that little piece of paper in my hand, as if in a dream. I wrote to her, asking her to become my wife, and offered to put the answer in the hollow of an old tree. She obviously did so, but I did not find him in the dark, and all these years have rushed by since then over this tree and this leaf...

The listeners were silent. The mayor wiped his eyes, and the judge grunted funny. They were old people now, but they also knew love in their youth.

That's when, said the grocer, you went to Texas and never saw her again?

No,” said the colonel, “when I did not come to them that night, she sent my father to me, and two months later we got married.” She and five guys are at my house now. Pass the tobacco, please.
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Copyright: short stories O.HENRY

O. Henry (1862–1910) – American writer late 19th and early 20th centuries. He received recognition from readers thanks to his short stories - sensual, deep, piercing, surprising with unexpected endings. The writer is also called the master of the “short story.” All of O. Henry's books are written in the genre of classical prose.

The writer's real name is William Sidney Porter. Native of Greensboro, North Carolina. When he was twenty, he came to Texas, where he remained to live. I tried it in caring for our daily bread different professions- pharmacist, cowboy, salesman. Subsequently, this experience will play a positive role in his work. The author will write his unforgettable short stories about them, ordinary people different professions.

At the same time, Porter became interested in journalism. While working as a cashier at the National Bank, he is suspected of embezzlement and flees to Honduras. There he waits for his wife and little daughter, but his wife dies. The father has to return home to his daughter. The court finds him guilty, Porter is sent to serve five years in prison.

Imprisonment became a turning point in the author’s work. He gets a lot of free time. In addition to fulfilling his duties as a pharmacist, he writes a lot. Begins to publish in various publications under the pseudonym O. Henry.

The first book was published in 1904 under the title “Kings and Cabbages.” This was the author's first and only novel. The novel was filmed by Soviet director Nikolai Rasheev in 1978 as a musical comedy.

But still the best books collections of short stories are recognized. Films based on these works began to be made back in 1933.

On our website you can read books by O. Henry online in fb2 (fb2), txt (tkht), epub and rtf formats. Following the chronology of the short stories and stories included in the collections “The Gifts of the Magi” and “The Last Leaf”, one can trace how the writer’s author’s style was improved.

There were days when O. Henry composed and recorded one story a day for a magazine that had a contract with him. Judging by the sequence of books written at that time, the author then paid more attention to entertaining readers than to artistic truth. The writer’s desire to earn more money was reflected.

We suggest downloading e-books in Russian. So, for example, “The Last Leaf” is Touching story, which tells the story of a seriously ill girl, deprived of any hope of recovery. And only the last leaf on the old ivy inspires faith. When he falls, everything will be over. But will he fall?

O. Henry passed away quite early. According to eyewitness accounts in last years he abused alcohol. For this reason, his second wife left him. He died in New York in 1910, leaving the world a wonderful legacy in the form of short stories carrying faith, hope and love.