The Best Short Stories of O. Henry

I was making my way methodically through the fiction section of our little local library recently, and when I got to the "O" section, I paused. In between the O'Haras and the O'Neills, I found an O. Henry. I sincerely hope a librarian did not put it there. I returned the book to its proper place, where, coincidentally, I had just minutes before selected a volume by the same author.

I've run into Henry's stories periodically throughout school, in various anthologies, and I've yet to read a piece of his that isn't thoroughly enjoyable. He manages his medium deftly, suffusing his abbreviated narratives with easily grasped characters and adorning his denouements with perpetually unpredicatable irony. Irony is of course Henry's hallmark; he is the father of the unexpected twist. His stories are essentially all about the experience of reading them - the bulk of each serves mainly as the setting for the jewel of the concluding line.

Suspense propels most of the plots. But it is not solely the suspense over what is to happen next; often it involves discovering why the story is worth reading at all. Many of Henry's tales appear quite mundane at the outset; they proceed pleasantly but not extraordinarily, and so the payoff for the reader does not occur until that very last line. Much like a Hitchcock movie, the plot in its entirety comes full circle only at the end.

But that's not to say the beginnings and the middles of the stories don't offer up their own merits. Henry writes with a garish verbosity whose audacity would disgrace a lesser writer, but which in Henry's hands becomes exciting and ultimately endearing, as he expertly wields words like "eleemosynary" and "peripatetic." He assumes the dialects of Americans as varied as his surprise endings, from New Yorkers to Texans to Mississippians. He procures excellent metaphors: "They had the appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides."

Henry treats his characters tenderly, sympathizing with the plights of his hoboes and shopgirls, not too stingy to refuse them a few happy endings. Irony is invariably cruel to the ficitional pawn of fate, but Henry often strives to lessen the sting. In his classic "The Gift of the Magi," he lauds his innocent protagonists: "Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest."

Henry manages to be both sardonic and sweet in a delightful blend of irony and sentimentality. It's a pity that misguided library shelf stacker had apparently never heard of him.