The Four Million
1903
(A bunch of witty stories illustrate the colorful variety of city people and the diverse pickles and circumstances in which they find themselves).
All text except quotations is copyright 1999 by David Lahti, and represents his views alone. Please comment on this page in my guestbook.
CONTENTS:
If you like this, you'd also like...
Summary and Reflection (stories marked with an asterisk [*] I think are the best)
Several storytellers can freeze a culture in time and space; several storytellers can portray a vignette in any period to any people; and several storytellers can tell a good yarn. O.Henry is a rarity because he does all three at once, in nearly every story he tells. In this collection he comments on the variety of persons one might find in New York City. The characters are still there today, although they wear different clothes, talk in a slightly different way, and have different occupations. But we will recognize our flagship city in these stories, certainly, and we can be grateful to the yarn-spinner for preserving it for all to experience. O.Henry tells a story in no ordinary way, using language with a very pleasing wit and range, and never failing to leave us wondering what the story is all about until the last short paragraph. This strategy of writing a story which gives the reader a boot to the pants at the very end was so successful and consistently used in his tales that fans of the short story will be well aware that the practice is today synonymous with his name.
I should warn you that a few of the descriptions below might spoil the stories for you if you have a good enough memory. Each story is very short and can be read in 20 minutes or less-- perfect to put a smile on your face before bed!
*"Tobin's Palm"
A great story of a palmist's predictions coming true.
*"The Gift of the Magi"
The touching tale of love and generosity between a poor husband and wife. It is undoubtedly O.Henry’s most famous story.
"A Cosmopolite in a Café"
Fun and quotable jabber about world travel.
"Between Rounds"
A couple in mêlée pause to lovingly care about a lost boy, and then go back to their violent pastime.
*"The Skylight Room"
A sweet, sad story of a romantic and vivacious young woman, who nevertheless is struck down by poverty and hunger. So many liked her, but none knew her enough to help her (a comment on New York society).
"A Service of Love"
Each of an artist couple give up their art for the sake of the other without either knowing it.
"The Coming-Out of Maggie"
A plain girl becomes popular when a handsome beau takes her to a dance-- even after he himself is disgraced.
"Man About Town"
The author searches for an example of a "man about town"-- and guess who it ends up being?
"The Cop and the Anthem"
A bum does all he can in vain to get arrested, and then succeeds just after he decides to turn over a new leaf!
"An Adjustment of Nature"
On a philosophical pretense, a man prevents a rich fellow from marrying a waitress-- so he can himself.
"Memoirs of a Yellow Dog"
A dog hates being coddled, pampered, and baby-talked.
"The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein"
A pharmacist's plan to drug a rival suitor backfires.
"Mammon and the Archer"
An idealistic boy knocks money as unable to buy time and therefore love-- but money gets him both in the end.
"Springtime à la Carte"
A woman thinks her lover has forgotten her, but 'tis not true.
*"The Green Door"
A defense of adventure followed by an example of it: a man follows his instinct for adventure and ends up helping a charming but poverty-stricken girl.
"From the Cabby's Seat"
A cab driver is so deep in the apathetic, economic philosophy of his trade that he treats his own wife as a fare.
"An Unfinished Story"
A tender narrative about a poor working girl turns into a trenchant jab at the greedy bastards who are her bosses.
"The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock"
An incognito Prince, a.k.a. park bum, saves the relationship of a stranger by exhorting him to pay no attention to clocks.
"Sisters of the Golden Circle"
A bride knows a bride at a glance-- One bride saves another's husband from arrest by temporarily sacrificing her own.
"The Romance of a Busy Broker"
A busy broker is so busy that he asks his stenographer to marry him-- when they had just been married the night before!
*"After Twenty Years"
A meeting set up 20 years ago with two old chums ends in one being arrested by the other for burglary-- a perfect example of the O. Henry plot twist.
"Lost on Dress Parade"
An architect poses as an idle clubber to impress a girl, but she is an incognito wealthy heiress looking for an honest working man-- a warning against putting on airs.
"By Courier"
An improvisational and witty-mouthed boy is the go-between in a misunderstanding between a couple.
*"The Furnished Room"
A man on a ceaseless search for his woman rents a room where he smells her perfume-- but tearing apart the room finds no trace of her. His patience gone, he commits suicide with the gas from the lamp. What he doesn't know, because the landlady kept it from him, is that the woman he was searching for did the same thing just a week earlier. It is an eerie tale, good with language.
*"The Brief Début of Tildy"
Wishing that men who came into the restaurant would attend to her as they do to beautiful Aileen, plain chubby Tildy the waitress goes about her work. One day she changes, though, and thinks herself romantic, after a man who had been drinking kisses her. The spell is broken later, though, when he apologizes and blames it on the alcohol.
To top of O.Henry's Four Million
"Not very long ago some one invented the 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'."
-Prefatory note
"She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love."
-"The Gift of the Magi"
"And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi."
-"The Gift of the Magi"
"He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d'hôte grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You would have addressed a letter to 'E. Rushmore Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,' and mailed it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him."
-"A Cosmopolite in a Café"
"Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the inhabitants of the Moon."
-"A Cosmopolite in a Café"
"What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a man by his post-office address? Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas, Indianans who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow-minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don't handicap him with the label of any section."
-"A Cosmopolite in a Café"
"It'll be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there."
-"A Cosmopolite in a Café"
"When ye run down politeness ye take the mortar from between the bricks of the foundations of society."
-"Between Rounds"
"In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt."
-"The Skylight Room"
"If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy."
-"The Cop and the Anthem"
"But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk in the jungle books."
-"Memoirs of a Yellow Dog"
"...at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs."
-"The Green Door"
"For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction."
-"An Unfinished Story"
"'Clocks,' said the Prince, 'are shackles on the feet of mankind.'"
-"The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock"
"...they were travelling the pace that passes all understanding."
-"Sisters of the Golden Circle"
"...he considered architecture to be truly an art; and he honestly believed-- though he would not have dared to admit it in New York-- that the Flatiron Building was inferior in design to the great cathedral in Milan."
-"Lost on Dress Parade"
"...this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime."
-"The Furnished Room"
"Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony."
-"The Furnished Room"
To top of O.Henry's Four Million
...you've got a few minutes to read a snappy story set in New York City which will encourage your sympathy with other human beings.
To top of O.Henry's Four Million
If you like this, you'd also like...
(for the down-to-earth American bedtime-story reader:)
-Mark Twain, The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and other Sketches (1867) (or another of the many collections of his short stories)
-Willa Cather, The Troll Garden (1905).
-Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919).
(for the O.Henryite:)
-O. Henry, Sixes and Sevens (1903).
-O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings (1904).
-O. Henry, Heart of the West (1904).
To top of O.Henry's Four Million
Find O. Henry's stories at Amazon.com:
(click on hardcover (left) or paperback (right):)
To top of O.Henry's Four Million
