O. Henry and the Twist Ending

O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter. He was born William Sidney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862, and changed the spelling of his middle name to Sydney in 1898. His life had nearly as many reversals as his stories.

New York gave him most of his material. A character in one of his stories calls the city “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” after the Baghdad of The Arabian Nights, a place where any stranger might have a tale. His first big New York collection, The Four Million (April 10, 1906), is full of shop girls, clerks, cops, con men and struggling artists. Today the O. Henry Prize for short fiction is named for him.

The name “O. Henry” first appeared over the story “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking” in the December 1899 issue of McClure’s Magazine, while Porter was still in prison. A friend in New Orleans forwarded his stories, so editors did not know where the writer was. By about 1902 it was the only name he used.

Where the name came from is not settled. Porter himself gave more than one explanation. Here are the main ones; notice that none can be proved.

• His own story (1909). In a New York Times interview of April 4, 1909, he said that in New Orleans a friend suggested picking a name from a newspaper’s society column. He chose “Henry,” then wanted something short for a first name: “O is about the easiest letter written, and O it is.”
• A prison guard. The Irish writer William Trevor wrote that “there was a prison guard named Orrin Henry” at the Ohio penitentiary.
• A French pharmacist. J. F. Clarke traced it to Etienne Ossian Henry, a French pharmacist named in the reference book Porter used in the prison pharmacy.
• Letters from the prison’s name. The scholar Guy Davenport suggested it was built from the letters of “Ohio” and “penitentiary.”

Ask yourself: why might a man just out of prison want a name, and a story about the name, that pointed anywhere but Ohio?

Publication. The story first ran in the New York Sunday World on December 10, 1905, under the title “Gifts of the Magi.” It appeared in book form in The Four Million in April 1906.

Summary. The story opens with a count: “One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies.” It is the day before Christmas, and that is all Della Young has to buy a present for her husband, Jim. They live in a furnished flat at $8 a week. They own two treasures: Jim’s gold watch, which was his father’s and grandfather’s, and Della’s long brown hair.

Della goes to Madame Sofronie, a dealer in hair goods, and sells her hair for twenty dollars. She spends twenty-one on a plain platinum fob chain worthy of Jim’s watch, which he has been carrying on an old leather strap. At home she curls what is left of her hair and waits. Jim comes in, stops, and stares at her with an expression “that she could not read.” Then he hands her his present: a set of combs she has admired in a Broadway window, “pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims,” made for the hair she no longer has. When she shows him the chain, he answers: “I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”

The narrator ends by calling the two “foolish children” who sacrificed their greatest treasures for each other, and then says that of all who give gifts, “they are wisest… They are the magi.”

Summary. The narrator, Sam, admits right away that the plan failed: “It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.” He and his partner, Bill Driscoll, need two thousand dollars for “a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois.” In the sleepy town of Summit, Alabama, they kidnap the ten-year-old son of Ebenezer Dorset, a tight-fisted, respectable citizen, and hide him in a cave on a mountain nearby.

The boy, Johnny, loves it. He names himself “Red Chief,” turns the kidnapping into a game, and makes Bill’s life miserable. He catches Bill “neatly in the eye with a piece of brick,” puts a hot boiled potato down his back, and rides him like a horse. “That boy had Bill terrorized from the start.” Meanwhile Summit stays calm; nobody seems to be searching. The men lower their demand from two thousand to fifteen hundred dollars and sign the letter “TWO DESPERATE MEN.”

Dorset’s answer turns the deal upside down: “You bring Johnny home and pay me two hundred and fifty dollars in cash, and I agree to take him off your hands.” The kidnappers accept. At midnight they hand over the money, and the boy clings to Bill’s leg. Dorset says, “I’m not as strong as I used to be… but I think I can promise you ten minutes.” Bill runs for it.

Summary. At about ten o’clock on a cold, windy night, a policeman on his beat finds a man waiting in the doorway of a dark hardware store. The man explains: twenty years ago tonight he ate dinner at “Big Joe” Brady’s restaurant, which once stood on this spot, with his best friend, Jimmy Wells. The next morning he left for the West. The two friends agreed to meet here again in exactly twenty years. The policeman knows the place: “Until five years ago… It was torn down then.”

When the man strikes a match to light his cigar, the light shows “a pale, square-jawed face with keen eyes, and a little white scar near his right eyebrow,” and a large diamond scarfpin. He brags that out West he has had “to compete with some of the sharpest wits going to get my pile.” The policeman wishes him luck and walks on.

About twenty minutes later a tall man in a long overcoat arrives and greets him as Bob. They walk off arm in arm. Under the bright lights of a drug store, Bob stops: “Twenty years is a long time, but not long enough to change a man’s nose from a Roman to a pug.” The tall man is a plainclothes officer. “Silky” Bob is wanted in Chicago, and he has been under arrest for ten minutes. The officer hands him a note from Patrolman Wells. Jimmy was the policeman in the doorway. He recognized the wanted man’s face in the match light, and “Somehow I couldn’t do it myself, so I went around and got a plain clothes man to do the job.”

Summary. Two young artists, Sue and Johnsy, share a studio at the top of a three-story brick house in Greenwich Village. One is from Maine and one from California. In November, pneumonia sweeps through the neighborhood, and Johnsy falls very ill. The doctor gives her “one chance in—let us say, ten,” and says her chances will be better if she can find something to live for.

Instead, Johnsy lies counting the leaves that fall from an old ivy vine on the brick wall outside her window. “When the last one falls I must go, too.” Sue tells their neighbor downstairs, old Behrman, a failed painter who “had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it.” A blank canvas in his room “had been waiting there for twenty-five years.” He scoffs at Johnsy’s idea. Then Sue and Behrman “peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking.” Outside, “A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow.”

In the morning one leaf is still there. It survives a second stormy night too, and Johnsy decides that it is a sin to want to die. She begins to recover. Then Sue tells her that Behrman has died of pneumonia after two days. The janitor found his shoes and clothes wet through and icy cold. Then they found a lantern, still lit, a ladder that had been moved, and a palette of green and yellow paint. “Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece—he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.”

These stories were written for readers in the early 1900s. Reading them well means noticing the attitudes of their time.

• Stereotypes in “The Ransom of Red Chief.” Johnny’s games are built on a cartoon idea of Native Americans: war whoops, scalping and the name “Red Chief” itself. The narrator also uses an insulting word for Native Americans. These images were everywhere in popular culture around 1907, in dime novels and Wild West shows. They are stereotypes, and we have not quoted them. Ask what the story assumes its readers find funny.
• A slur. One sentence in the same story uses a racial slur against Black Americans as the name of a kind of rock. It was a common term then and is offensive now. We do not print it.
• Dialect. In “The Last Leaf,” Behrman’s German accent is spelled out on the page. O. Henry uses it for color and some comedy. Notice that the story still makes Behrman its hero.
• Money and class. All four stories turn on money: $1.87, a ransom, a diamond scarfpin, a cheap top-floor studio. O. Henry wrote mostly about people with little of it. Ask whether he treats them with respect or with a smile at their expense.

• O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi” and “After Twenty Years,” in The Four Million, Project Gutenberg eBook #2776 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/2776).
• O. Henry, “The Last Leaf,” in The Trimmed Lamp and Other Stories of the Four Million, Project Gutenberg eBook #3707 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/3707).
• The FictionMags Index, “Porter, William Sydney” (first printings: “After Twenty Years,” The (New York) Sunday World, February 14, 1904; “The Last Leaf,” The (New York) Sunday World, October 15, 1905; The Trimmed Lamp, McClure, Phillips & Co., April 1907). Wikipedia, “The Last Leaf,” gives the same October 15, 1905 date.
• O. Henry, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in Whirligigs, Project Gutenberg eBook #1595 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/1595).
• Wikipedia, “O. Henry” (life dates, the bank case, the trial and prison dates, the 1899 McClure’s story, the 381 New York stories, the competing pen-name explanations and the April 4, 1909 New York Times interview), “The Gift of the Magi” (December 10, 1905 and April 1906), “The Ransom of Red Chief” (July 6, 1907), “The Four Million” (April 10, 1906, and the title) and “Plot twist” (twist and surprise endings).
• Louis Menand, “Are All Short Stories O. Henry Stories?,” The New Yorker, June 28, 2021 (the term “O. Henry ending” and the quotation in the toolkit).
• Summaries are our own paraphrases. Every quotation from the stories was checked against the Project Gutenberg texts above.
• Art: the last-leaf and gift illustrations and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami.