This is kind of an amusing post for me to read, because when I was in HS almost all my friends read O. Henry! I don't think this was typical for high schoolers in the 2010s, but the reason for this is that they all played quizbowl, an academic trivia competition that happened to have a lot of O. Henry questions. O. Henry got asked about a lot because he was in a perfect sweet spot: he was "accessible"—that is, even a middle schooler could get something out of reading his stories, but he also wasn't one of those authors like Edgar Allan Poe where ~everyone~ had read his greatest hits. And his stories were also quite easy to write about in a clear way, so writers didn't have to spend as much effort on such questions. The end result is that O. Henry was one of the top 25 most common authors to appear as an answer in competition, and maybe even top 5 at lower levels.
People who got deeper into quizbowl didn't consider O. Henry to be "high literature", but he was one of those authors that you could always casually reference since just about everyone had encountered his stories in one way or another.
Here's an example of someone dropping an O. Henry reference in a competition question in an almost meme-like way:
> A musical artist who gained fame under a stage moniker named after these objects claimed in one song that he, “had a sit down with Farrakhan” and “Turned the White House to the Terror Dome.” Della sells her hair to buy Jim one of these objects for his watch in "The Gift of the Magi", and in calculus, a rule named after these objects states that the derivative of (*) f of g of x is f prime of g of x times g prime of x. The Communist Manifesto claims that the Proletarians have nothing to lose but these objects, and The Social Contract begins, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in” these objects. Fenrir was bound in, for ten points, what metal objects composed of several connected links.
(I'm planning to write a post about quizbowl at some point. Even though I would expect most Gen Zers on Substack to have at least heard of quizbowl, I don't get the sense that older readers really know much about what was going on inside this somewhat unusual subculture.)
I loved quizbowl and it was amazing!! Gen Xers were all about it - in middle school we had the Economics Quiz Bowl, and in high school it was more general knowledge. One year the finals were at Disney World - so much fun.
Kentucky Public television had a quizbowl-type trivia show in the 80s where high schools competed against each other. I was on it as a freshman, as part of a team of three. Our whole 'Challenge' class took the day as a field trip to cheer us on.
I honestly don't remember if we won or not. The only thing I remember is that the girl I was obsessed with at the time hugged me and said she was proud of me, and that event blew every other detail out of my mind.
Short stories are always popular because they give a reader the essence of life in the short form, and if you love a story, you could read it endlessly, as I do with Chekov's "Boring Life." I remember O. Henry's "The Gift of Magi" for over 60 years; this story was so romantic and dear to our Soviet children. To read such a light opinion of yours now, "I have no idea that they teach kids about this story," is very strange. And we still reread Edgar Allan Poe, in English, now.
Thank you so much for understanding my comment. The Gift of Magi is the story about so deep selfless love to each other, and a literary critic doesn’t understand the story and why the story is taught in the schools. It is amazing to me.
I was waiting for you to mention F.Scott Fitzgerald!
You didn't mention his mentor, Hemingway, a popular writer if ever there was one, and HIS mentor, Sherwood Anderson.
I love the American short story, (am a died-in-the-wool Brit), and I think no one else does it so well. (That includes William Trevor and Chekhov, whom I find depressing).
I love the greats of the 50's and 60's,such as John Cheever. I think they absolutely nail down to earth realism which screens over a deeply philosophical point in each story, just the one, which you can easily miss if the seductive smoothness of the writing carries you away. These were compendium-ised in a Penguin edition "Stories from the New Yorker" which I devoured in my late teens.
Modern stories in the New Yorker don't grab me at all. Maybe it's my age, more likely that what you fell in love with in your youth can never be replaced.
> Modern stories in the New Yorker don't grab me at all. Maybe it's my age, more likely that what you fell in love with in your youth can never be replaced.
I'm glad O. Henry is getting reevaluated. His stories are much funnier and more subversive than, say, Modern Love. Which is to say, the "high culture" of today is much lower-brow than the culture that dismissed O'Henry as middlebrow.
I love Dwight MacDonald as a critic, but people take him a bit too seriously. He was notorious for typing first and asking questions later. He had very strong opinions but he also changed his mind a lot. People today interpret his opinions as probably harsher than he meant them to be.
You should write about James Gould Cozzens, a writer whose reputation was famously ruined by Dwight MacDonald. I've read one of his books, a novella called Castaway, that I thought was pretty good. Fringe conservative literary types have long been agitating for a Cozzens revival.
I read Castaway years ago, maybe after reading MacDonald’s takedown, and was intrigued by the early Cozzens. Castaway reads like sci-fi, and its department store setting seemed to anticipate movies like Dawn of the Dead, which takes place in a mall.
Possibly also worth mentioning are the pulp magazine, which got their start, more or less, at the turn of the 20th Century. Magazines like Argosy, which started in 1882 as a kid's magazine, and went through a couple of modifications (and a change of ownership) until it became a true pulp magazine in 1896, by which time it was fully devoted to adventure stories, and was published on pulp paper. Other general fiction pulps were Adventure, Blue Book, and Short Stories, as well as All Story Weekly which eventually merged with Argosy. And of course there were tons of specialty magazines, including of course the first science fiction magazines. These of course were aimed at a broader, in general lower class, audience than the magazines you discuss above. (Munsey's Magazine was of course also published by Frank Munsey, who was Argosy's publisher, and it seems to have been his more high-toned piece, though still more aimed at a popular audience than the Atlantic, etc., as indicated by a habit of including illustrations of semi-clad women.)
It really is something to see how much writers were paid for short stories in those days!
As for O. Henry, of course I read "The Gift of the Magi" in school, and also "The Ransom of Red Chief" (the one where kidnappers end up paying the parents to take the kidnapped kid back because he's so annoying.) A couple of years ago I found a couple of his short story collections (The Four Million and The Trimmed Lamp) at an antique store for next to nothing. I've been meaning to read them through -- I did sample The Four Million and I did note the variety of people he featured, and a definite sympathy for immigrants and poor people.
My older brother collected the later novelizations of a lot of those pulp heroes like the Shadow and Doc Savage. This small convention in Pittsburgh is coming up in August.
Perhaps this is apropos of this most enjoyable discussion of O. Henry and the popular short story. In any event, allow me to recommend G.K. Chesterton’s discussion of the modern genre of the short story in his critical study of Dickens. In the chapter on “The Pickwick Papers,” Dickens opines:
“Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion….The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true one. But in this elder literature, even in the comic literature (indeed, especially in the comic literature), the reverse is true. The characters are felt to be fixed things of which we have fleeting glimpses; that is, they are felt to be divine.”
The whole passage is of interest, not only to this discussion of O. Henry, but also to Naomi’s and others’ recent discussions of the decline of literary fiction.
v. different scene of course but seems like the kind of "popular" structural approach to short fiction you're describing has survived a lot longer in the horror/SF space. Even writers of high "literary" value like Brian Evanson, Reggie Oliver or (a bit earlier) Robert Aickman understand the value of a good stinger on the last page. in any event I'm not super up on current horror and not sure how large the audience for short fiction in that zone is these days - I suspect no higher than that for the O. Henry prize books at this point. anyhow thanks, fascinating piece!
I'm not a horror guy but short fiction is alive and well in SF in audio form. This podcast has been running weekly since the early aughts. They just hit their 1000th episode.
Thank you as always for a great dive into American literary history! One correction: there are other regular contributors to the Saturday Evening Post in that era whose reputations survive today: P.G. Wodehouse and Sinclair Lewis, to name two.
I spent two years deep in the cavern of 19th Century magazines, researching a book about the creation and rise to popularity of Sherlock Holmes. Those things were wild! Huge jumbles of text about all manner of topics, rammed together with very little organizational structure. From the point of view of a magazine editor of today (me) it seemed like the material was often *not* edited in the painstaking, line-by-line, fact-checked “craft” that we learned from The New Yorker. Certainly, the Sherlock Holmes stories were not edited. (They are full of obvious continuity errors that have become, with time, part of their charm.) The editors of those journals seem to have conceived of their jobs somewhat differently: they edited by signing up the name-brand writers and commissioning the articles they thought would draw readers, and from there kinda let it rip.
This was super entertaining and informative to read. I got a real kick out of reading O. Henry's stories when I was young and they motivated me to try writing myself. Later I heard that his "twist at the end" form is looked down upon and I didn't understand why – yeah, it does get repetitive after a while if you expect a twist at the end, but they're still fun to read. "The Pendulum" was one story we read at school. Loved it. There's a kids' comic magazine named Tinkle that used to make graphic adaptations of popular stories, and they adapted "A retrieved reformation" by O. Henry in which a safecracker turns over a new leaf. Like you say, the range of his characters from all areas of life was appealing to me.
Tracking the evolution of the short story as a form and the rise and fall of short stories in magazine culture was really interesting! I wonder if in the process of becoming "perfect" and gaining literary approval, the short story went from a messy living form to a cold dead form that scared people away. Thanks for putting this together. When you say, "so some academics went further afield and started to focus on popular writers", who are these other popular writers? Also you mentioned you were reading a compendium of the Saturday Evening Post in one of your notes – is that a book I can check out somewhere?
In the American Short Story unit that I taught my sons in our homeschool, O'Henry's "Ransom of Red Chief" and "The Last Leaf" were part of the syllabus. My spectrum kiddos roared with delight at Red Chief, but their amazing, emotional response to "The Last Leaf" astounded me. Both of them struggle with social-emotional cues and with inferences in fiction works--but that dreary O'Henry tale seemed to unlock a whole new world for them.
"The Gift of the Magi" is still a story I love to read every year around Christmas—somehow I still find myself moved by the ending, even if a part of me thinks its sentimentality is a little too on-the-nose. It'll be interesting to see where O. Henry's reputation goes in the next few decades. I wonder if the disappearance of short stories from many publications has to do with the way that they're being written now and it's becoming a kind of vicious cycle—writers write short stories with these ambiguous endings and aim to be "highbrow," making the stories less accessible to the general reader, leading to magazines increasingly sidelining short fiction for other kinds of pieces, which makes writers write the kinds of stories they think will get into literary magazines with a more niche readership.
I wonder how O. Henry's writing compares to the other "middle class" writers of the time. Did they all tack on these sorts of twist endings to go viral? It would be nice if the short story could mount a comeback; maybe all we need is the return of the Lovecraftian framing of "I found this old notebook in a cafe, and it said..." Or maybe the problem instead is that the ending of modern fiction is so fearful of seeming overdone that it's quiet to the point of forgettability.
Short stories were a staple of reading instruction when I was a kid. We had anthologies where I read Saki's "The Interlopers" and "Harrison Bergeron" and "The Most Dangerous Game," which has been referenced or redone by basically every SF / comic / action-adventure property ever.
I got back into short stories during grad school, when novels became too much of a time sink.
O. Henry is a local celeb here in Greensboro. There's a hotel and a magazine named for him, as well as numerous local contests. My high school play (back in KY) was a production of "The Ransom of Red Chief."
This is kind of an amusing post for me to read, because when I was in HS almost all my friends read O. Henry! I don't think this was typical for high schoolers in the 2010s, but the reason for this is that they all played quizbowl, an academic trivia competition that happened to have a lot of O. Henry questions. O. Henry got asked about a lot because he was in a perfect sweet spot: he was "accessible"—that is, even a middle schooler could get something out of reading his stories, but he also wasn't one of those authors like Edgar Allan Poe where ~everyone~ had read his greatest hits. And his stories were also quite easy to write about in a clear way, so writers didn't have to spend as much effort on such questions. The end result is that O. Henry was one of the top 25 most common authors to appear as an answer in competition, and maybe even top 5 at lower levels.
People who got deeper into quizbowl didn't consider O. Henry to be "high literature", but he was one of those authors that you could always casually reference since just about everyone had encountered his stories in one way or another.
Here's an example of someone dropping an O. Henry reference in a competition question in an almost meme-like way:
> A musical artist who gained fame under a stage moniker named after these objects claimed in one song that he, “had a sit down with Farrakhan” and “Turned the White House to the Terror Dome.” Della sells her hair to buy Jim one of these objects for his watch in "The Gift of the Magi", and in calculus, a rule named after these objects states that the derivative of (*) f of g of x is f prime of g of x times g prime of x. The Communist Manifesto claims that the Proletarians have nothing to lose but these objects, and The Social Contract begins, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in” these objects. Fenrir was bound in, for ten points, what metal objects composed of several connected links.
ANSWER: chains
(source: 2017 Ladue Invitational Spring Tournament https://quizbowlpackets.com/1978/)
(I'm planning to write a post about quizbowl at some point. Even though I would expect most Gen Zers on Substack to have at least heard of quizbowl, I don't get the sense that older readers really know much about what was going on inside this somewhat unusual subculture.)
This is so funny! One of the most entertaining and informative comments I've ever gotten.
I loved quizbowl and it was amazing!! Gen Xers were all about it - in middle school we had the Economics Quiz Bowl, and in high school it was more general knowledge. One year the finals were at Disney World - so much fun.
Kentucky Public television had a quizbowl-type trivia show in the 80s where high schools competed against each other. I was on it as a freshman, as part of a team of three. Our whole 'Challenge' class took the day as a field trip to cheer us on.
I honestly don't remember if we won or not. The only thing I remember is that the girl I was obsessed with at the time hugged me and said she was proud of me, and that event blew every other detail out of my mind.
Short stories are always popular because they give a reader the essence of life in the short form, and if you love a story, you could read it endlessly, as I do with Chekov's "Boring Life." I remember O. Henry's "The Gift of Magi" for over 60 years; this story was so romantic and dear to our Soviet children. To read such a light opinion of yours now, "I have no idea that they teach kids about this story," is very strange. And we still reread Edgar Allan Poe, in English, now.
Thank you so much for understanding my comment. The Gift of Magi is the story about so deep selfless love to each other, and a literary critic doesn’t understand the story and why the story is taught in the schools. It is amazing to me.
I was waiting for you to mention F.Scott Fitzgerald!
You didn't mention his mentor, Hemingway, a popular writer if ever there was one, and HIS mentor, Sherwood Anderson.
I love the American short story, (am a died-in-the-wool Brit), and I think no one else does it so well. (That includes William Trevor and Chekhov, whom I find depressing).
I love the greats of the 50's and 60's,such as John Cheever. I think they absolutely nail down to earth realism which screens over a deeply philosophical point in each story, just the one, which you can easily miss if the seductive smoothness of the writing carries you away. These were compendium-ised in a Penguin edition "Stories from the New Yorker" which I devoured in my late teens.
Modern stories in the New Yorker don't grab me at all. Maybe it's my age, more likely that what you fell in love with in your youth can never be replaced.
> Modern stories in the New Yorker don't grab me at all. Maybe it's my age, more likely that what you fell in love with in your youth can never be replaced.
It's not your age, they're much worse.
It's not just me, then!
I'm glad O. Henry is getting reevaluated. His stories are much funnier and more subversive than, say, Modern Love. Which is to say, the "high culture" of today is much lower-brow than the culture that dismissed O'Henry as middlebrow.
I love Dwight MacDonald as a critic, but people take him a bit too seriously. He was notorious for typing first and asking questions later. He had very strong opinions but he also changed his mind a lot. People today interpret his opinions as probably harsher than he meant them to be.
You should write about James Gould Cozzens, a writer whose reputation was famously ruined by Dwight MacDonald. I've read one of his books, a novella called Castaway, that I thought was pretty good. Fringe conservative literary types have long been agitating for a Cozzens revival.
I read Castaway years ago, maybe after reading MacDonald’s takedown, and was intrigued by the early Cozzens. Castaway reads like sci-fi, and its department store setting seemed to anticipate movies like Dawn of the Dead, which takes place in a mall.
Yep, it reminded me of Dawn of the Dead. Apparently Sam Peckinpah wanted to make it into a movie which would've been a great fit.
But Modern Love is an NYT column, not by any means “high culture.”
This stuff is meat and drink to me!
Possibly also worth mentioning are the pulp magazine, which got their start, more or less, at the turn of the 20th Century. Magazines like Argosy, which started in 1882 as a kid's magazine, and went through a couple of modifications (and a change of ownership) until it became a true pulp magazine in 1896, by which time it was fully devoted to adventure stories, and was published on pulp paper. Other general fiction pulps were Adventure, Blue Book, and Short Stories, as well as All Story Weekly which eventually merged with Argosy. And of course there were tons of specialty magazines, including of course the first science fiction magazines. These of course were aimed at a broader, in general lower class, audience than the magazines you discuss above. (Munsey's Magazine was of course also published by Frank Munsey, who was Argosy's publisher, and it seems to have been his more high-toned piece, though still more aimed at a popular audience than the Atlantic, etc., as indicated by a habit of including illustrations of semi-clad women.)
It really is something to see how much writers were paid for short stories in those days!
As for O. Henry, of course I read "The Gift of the Magi" in school, and also "The Ransom of Red Chief" (the one where kidnappers end up paying the parents to take the kidnapped kid back because he's so annoying.) A couple of years ago I found a couple of his short story collections (The Four Million and The Trimmed Lamp) at an antique store for next to nothing. I've been meaning to read them through -- I did sample The Four Million and I did note the variety of people he featured, and a definite sympathy for immigrants and poor people.
My older brother collected the later novelizations of a lot of those pulp heroes like the Shadow and Doc Savage. This small convention in Pittsburgh is coming up in August.
https://pulpfest.com/
There's a Munsey award.
Perhaps this is apropos of this most enjoyable discussion of O. Henry and the popular short story. In any event, allow me to recommend G.K. Chesterton’s discussion of the modern genre of the short story in his critical study of Dickens. In the chapter on “The Pickwick Papers,” Dickens opines:
“Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion….The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true one. But in this elder literature, even in the comic literature (indeed, especially in the comic literature), the reverse is true. The characters are felt to be fixed things of which we have fleeting glimpses; that is, they are felt to be divine.”
The whole passage is of interest, not only to this discussion of O. Henry, but also to Naomi’s and others’ recent discussions of the decline of literary fiction.
v. different scene of course but seems like the kind of "popular" structural approach to short fiction you're describing has survived a lot longer in the horror/SF space. Even writers of high "literary" value like Brian Evanson, Reggie Oliver or (a bit earlier) Robert Aickman understand the value of a good stinger on the last page. in any event I'm not super up on current horror and not sure how large the audience for short fiction in that zone is these days - I suspect no higher than that for the O. Henry prize books at this point. anyhow thanks, fascinating piece!
I'm not a horror guy but short fiction is alive and well in SF in audio form. This podcast has been running weekly since the early aughts. They just hit their 1000th episode.
https://escapepod.org/
Thank you as always for a great dive into American literary history! One correction: there are other regular contributors to the Saturday Evening Post in that era whose reputations survive today: P.G. Wodehouse and Sinclair Lewis, to name two.
I spent two years deep in the cavern of 19th Century magazines, researching a book about the creation and rise to popularity of Sherlock Holmes. Those things were wild! Huge jumbles of text about all manner of topics, rammed together with very little organizational structure. From the point of view of a magazine editor of today (me) it seemed like the material was often *not* edited in the painstaking, line-by-line, fact-checked “craft” that we learned from The New Yorker. Certainly, the Sherlock Holmes stories were not edited. (They are full of obvious continuity errors that have become, with time, part of their charm.) The editors of those journals seem to have conceived of their jobs somewhat differently: they edited by signing up the name-brand writers and commissioning the articles they thought would draw readers, and from there kinda let it rip.
When I think of short stories, I always go to Truman Capote. I see something new with each reading.
If you’re studying the short story, why don’t you start with William Trevor or are you particularly invested in the American writers?
This was super entertaining and informative to read. I got a real kick out of reading O. Henry's stories when I was young and they motivated me to try writing myself. Later I heard that his "twist at the end" form is looked down upon and I didn't understand why – yeah, it does get repetitive after a while if you expect a twist at the end, but they're still fun to read. "The Pendulum" was one story we read at school. Loved it. There's a kids' comic magazine named Tinkle that used to make graphic adaptations of popular stories, and they adapted "A retrieved reformation" by O. Henry in which a safecracker turns over a new leaf. Like you say, the range of his characters from all areas of life was appealing to me.
Tracking the evolution of the short story as a form and the rise and fall of short stories in magazine culture was really interesting! I wonder if in the process of becoming "perfect" and gaining literary approval, the short story went from a messy living form to a cold dead form that scared people away. Thanks for putting this together. When you say, "so some academics went further afield and started to focus on popular writers", who are these other popular writers? Also you mentioned you were reading a compendium of the Saturday Evening Post in one of your notes – is that a book I can check out somewhere?
In the American Short Story unit that I taught my sons in our homeschool, O'Henry's "Ransom of Red Chief" and "The Last Leaf" were part of the syllabus. My spectrum kiddos roared with delight at Red Chief, but their amazing, emotional response to "The Last Leaf" astounded me. Both of them struggle with social-emotional cues and with inferences in fiction works--but that dreary O'Henry tale seemed to unlock a whole new world for them.
"The Gift of the Magi" is still a story I love to read every year around Christmas—somehow I still find myself moved by the ending, even if a part of me thinks its sentimentality is a little too on-the-nose. It'll be interesting to see where O. Henry's reputation goes in the next few decades. I wonder if the disappearance of short stories from many publications has to do with the way that they're being written now and it's becoming a kind of vicious cycle—writers write short stories with these ambiguous endings and aim to be "highbrow," making the stories less accessible to the general reader, leading to magazines increasingly sidelining short fiction for other kinds of pieces, which makes writers write the kinds of stories they think will get into literary magazines with a more niche readership.
I wonder how O. Henry's writing compares to the other "middle class" writers of the time. Did they all tack on these sorts of twist endings to go viral? It would be nice if the short story could mount a comeback; maybe all we need is the return of the Lovecraftian framing of "I found this old notebook in a cafe, and it said..." Or maybe the problem instead is that the ending of modern fiction is so fearful of seeming overdone that it's quiet to the point of forgettability.
Short stories were a staple of reading instruction when I was a kid. We had anthologies where I read Saki's "The Interlopers" and "Harrison Bergeron" and "The Most Dangerous Game," which has been referenced or redone by basically every SF / comic / action-adventure property ever.
I got back into short stories during grad school, when novels became too much of a time sink.
O. Henry is a local celeb here in Greensboro. There's a hotel and a magazine named for him, as well as numerous local contests. My high school play (back in KY) was a production of "The Ransom of Red Chief."