O. Henry. Gift of the Magi. Squaring the Circle.

O. Henry – was the pen name of the American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910). O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.

O. Henry is one of the most famous American short story writers. O. Henry’s real name was William Sydney Porter and he was born in Greensboro, North Carolina on September 11, 1862. In 1894 while working for First National Bank in Austin, Porter was accused of stealing $4000. He went to prison in Columbus, Ohio for 3 years eventually. While in prison Porter first started to write short stories and it’s believed that he has found his writer’s pseudonym there. After Porter was released from the prison in 1901, he changed his name to O. Henry and moved to New York in 1902. From December 1903 to January 1906 o. Henry wrote a story a week for the New York World magazine, and published several short stories in other magazines. In his last years O. Henry had financial and health problems. An alcoholic, O. Henry died on June 5, 1910 in New York City, virtually broke.

O. Henry's stories frequently have surprise endings. In his day, he was called the American answer to Guy de Maupassant. Both authors wrote plot twist endings, but O. Henry stories were much more playful. His stories are also known for witty narration.

Most of O. Henry's stories are set in his own time, the early 20th century. Many take place in New York City and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses.

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 is contained in Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories each of which explores some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town, while advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another.

Cabbages and Kings was his first collection of stories, followed by The Four Million. The second collection 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," and many of his stories are set there — while others are set in small towns or in other cities.

The content of his stories suggests that Porter was a romantic. Yet he viewed his writing as an ordinary job rather than a higher calling. "It is my way of getting money to pay room rent, to buy food and clothes and Pilsener," he claimed. "I write for no other reason or purpose."

Among his most famous stories are:

"The Gift of the Magi" about a young couple who are short of money but desperately want to buy each other Christmas gifts. Unbeknownst to Jim, Della sells her most valuable possession, her beautiful hair, in order to buy a platinum fob chain for Jim's watch; while unbeknownst to Della, Jim sells his own most valuable possession, his watch, to buy jeweled combs for Della's hair. The essential premise of this story has been copied, re-worked, parodied, and otherwise re-told countless times in the century since it was written.

“Squaring the Circle” is a 1908 short story that begins with “a discourse on geometry”. After this surprise discourse, the third-person narrator launches into a comical tale of two men from Kentucky who are engaged in a feud (вражда, вендетта). The story is fairly brief and is filled with witty observations about American life at the time of its writing. These traits are common to all of the O. Henry stories. The “discourse” at the start of the story draws parallels between geometric concepts and the contrasting American lifestyles in rural and urban settings. The narrator argues that straight lines and angles are the stuff of artifice and of humankind’s imprint on its surroundings. On the other hand, he argues, “Nature moves in circles”. This is an interesting analogy that the narrator extends several paragraphs in before switching over the main narrative. It forces the reader to think throughout the story about the traits and habits associated with Americans from rural versus urban areas.

The Kentucky feud results in lots of murder and bloodshed, which the narrator sarcastically refers to as the “pruning” of the Folwell and Harkness family trees. Eventually, the narrator tells us, the feud resulted in each family having only a single surviving member. The surviving Harkness, Cal, sets off for New York City to get away from his family’s murderous past, and Sam Folwell sets off to find him in these unfamiliar surroundings and exact his revenge. Sam’s visit to New York City is extremely disconcerting in that he encounters all of the aspects of urban living at the turn of the twentieth century that set it so radically apart from rural living. In the story’s end, he randomly meets Cal on the sidewalk at the intersections of “Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Twenty-third Street”. Sam Folwell is so relieved to see a familiar face that he immediately puts aside all thoughts of the feud and warmly greets his former foe using a rural hello: “Howdy, Cal! I’m durned glad to see ye” (1276).

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