Working people, comic schemes, generosity, and surprise endings.
O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), an American short story writer. He worked as a pharmacist, draftsman, and bank teller before writing full time. He published stories while serving a prison sentence in Ohio for embezzlement. After his release, he moved to New York in 1902 and wrote many of his best-known stories there.
His characters include shop workers, clerks, con artists, and people struggling to pay their bills. In “The Gift of the Magi,” a young married couple tries to afford Christmas presents. “The Ransom of Red Chief” follows two kidnappers whose captive causes unexpected trouble. His narrators use wordplay and informal language, and his endings often reveal information that changes how earlier events are understood.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
Della has one dollar and eighty-seven cents, and one day left to buy her husband a Christmas present worth giving.
In a Greenwich Village artists' colony, a gravely ill young painter ties her fate to the last leaf on a neighboring vine.
A millionaire father bets that money can solve his son's romantic dilemma, while the young lover searches for one uninterrupted moment.
A ruined lawyer is offered cash for his inherited feud, forcing an old mountain honor code into a startling new bargain.
A fugitive from a Texas gunfight is offered a dangerous new identity in a distant coastal country.
A traveling journalist arrives in supposedly uneventful Nashville and discovers that its quiet streets conceal tangled loyalties and danger.
A celebrated safecracker tries to build an honest life under a new name, but his old skills are not finished with him.
Two young artists quietly sacrifice for each other when money runs out and their shared creative life is threatened.
Two old friends keep a twenty-year appointment, but the lives they built have carried them to opposite sides of the law.
A shopgirl living on six dollars a week faces the glittering promise of dinner and the danger hidden behind it.
A young man sends a street boy to plead his case to the woman who has forbidden him to write or speak to her.
Two veteran swindlers target a Pittsburgh millionaire’s passion for antiquities, while one partner tries to keep his conscience intact.
On a train crossing the West, a chance reunion forces a young man to choose between truth and the image he once hoped to become.
A former Southwestern outlaw explains how train robberies work—and why the life is not worth the price.
A traveling medicine seller uses personal magnetism to outwit a town's mayor, its doctor, and the law itself.
A young architect spends his carefully saved evening posing as a wealthy clubman when he invites a stranger to dinner.
A yellow dog surveys his unhappy New York home and decides that he and his henpecked master both deserve a better life.
A carefree young heir must explain how he spends a thousand-dollar bequest before learning what the money may truly be worth.
A struggling typist finds spring, memory, and a lost love hiding among the daily dishes on a restaurant menu.
A plain waitress mistakes one impulsive kiss for her long-awaited entrance into the glamorous world of romance.
A ruthless Texas outlaw, a determined ranger, and the woman between them move toward a reckoning in the thorny frontier.
After watching the woman he loves marry another man, a proud bachelor reconstructs the misunderstanding that destroyed his chance.
A detective recognizes an old friend as a murderer, but an unpaid debt makes arrest more complicated than duty should allow.
A shy paper-box worker arrives at her Saturday dance with a glamorous escort and suddenly becomes the center of attention.
A homeless New Yorker tries every trick he can think of to secure a warm winter bed behind bars.
A boarder in mourning attracts a would-be suitor with a tale of a dead count, but wedding plans bring other secrets to light.
A proud former Confederate officer is offended when an actor turns his old-fashioned manners and clothes into a theatrical sensation.
A traveling swindler recruits a mountain hog thief, only to discover that even a comic partnership has its own ethics.
A young man searching for a vanished singer rents a decaying room whose lingering traces seem to answer his longing.
A young man devoted to adventure follows a mysterious green door and finds a chance to make romance matter.
Two snowbound prospectors educate themselves with very different books, then put their new knowledge to work in a small Montana town.
A talkative sheepherder takes a job on a lonely Texas ranch where a notorious train robber may be hiding nearby.
A timid pharmacist helps his rival elope with the woman they both love by preparing a very questionable love potion.
Jeff Peters explains the ethics of graft after teaming up with a burglar and a ruined financier in a town with one tempting bank.
Two confidence men corner a flood-bound town, but their monopoly faces an unexpected challenge from inside the partnership.
When his wife unexpectedly leaves for the night, a bored husband discovers how much of his ordinary life he has taken for granted.
A sidelined cowboy asks his camp cook for pancakes and hears the wild story of a recipe, a romance, and a very successful deception.
A ranch foreman tries to impress a fearless cattle king's daughter when a dangerous lion interrupts their evening in the prairie.
Two bungling kidnappers discover that their captive is far more trouble than the ransom is worth.
After a daring train robbery, two partners must decide who gets the only horse capable of carrying them away.
A relentlessly busy Wall Street broker finally pauses long enough to make a romantic gesture to his quiet stenographer.
A struggling typist finds a small, private universe in the star she watches through the skylight of her attic room.
Two struggling women share a makeshift stew, while a mysterious stranger arrives carrying the one ingredient they lack.
Two young working women pursue very different futures in a city where wages, style, and marriage all promise escape.
A mountain couple arrives at a makeshift court demanding a divorce, only to discover that separation may be harder than marriage.
A grieving Irishman treats a palmist’s predictions as a treasure map and pursues the stranger meant to bring him luck.
Two working New Yorkers spend a week pretending to be wealthy guests at a Broadway hotel and find an unexpected kindred spirit.
Every Thanksgiving, a wealthy old man takes a homeless stranger to dinner, preserving a private tradition neither can bear to break.
A chance meeting in a city park lets two strangers imagine love beyond the boundaries of wealth and social rank.
A lonely baker imagines that a quiet customer is a struggling artist and finds a tender way to help him.
