Chapter II

Practically the whole body of O. Henry's stories and sketches first appeared in periodicals. Doubleday, Page & Company (now Doubleday, Doran and Company) have put into book form almost everything he wrote, and the volumes in the order of their publication are as follows: _Cabbages and Kings_, 1904; _The Four Million_, 1906; The Trimmed Lamp and _Heart of the West_, 1907; _The Voice of the City_ and _The Gentle Grafter_, 1908; _Roads of Destiny_ and _Options_, 1909; _Strictly Business_ and _Whirligigs_, 1910; _Sixes and Sevens_, 1911; Rolling Stones, 1913; _Waifs and Strays_, 1917. In 1923 Harper and Brothers brought out _Postscripts_ by O. Henry, edited by Florence Stratton.

The title of _Rolling Stones_, invented by Harry Peyton Steger, is based on the weekly, _The Rolling Stone_, published by O. Henry in Texas in 1894 and 1895. It contains odds and ends; some stories written when O. Henry was at his best, "The Fog in Santone," for example; material used in the original The Rolling Stone; excerpts from the Postscripts column written for the _Houston Post_; and a few letters. _Postscripts_ by O. Henry, as the name suggests, contains material taken from Will Porter's _Houston Post_ column. _The Four Million_ is based on New York life, and _The Trimmed Lamp_, _The Voice of the City_, and _Strictly Business_ are simply "more stories of the four million." _Heart of the West_ is made up exclusively of western stories. _Cabbages and Kings_, a composite of several individual stories separately published and now woven together, depicts life as O. Henry saw it in Honduras, Central America. _The Gentle Grafter_ is supposedly based upon stories which O. Henry heard his fellow prisoners relate in the Ohio Penitentiary. The other volumes are made up of stories varied in character--New York, Texas, and tropical America.

Just as every other great artist has done, O. Henry has set an example. He invented a short-story technique of his own, and the most discriminating critics have studied that technique and pronounced it good. He owed no more to the "unity of impression idea" of Poe than to the stringy structure of the medieval Patient Griselda. Almost by chance, it seems, he hit upon the trick of concentration of attention, economy of words, rising suspense, and denouement of climax and surprise; and in that trick lies his art.

There was in O. Henry, however, a power greater than his art. That was his genius for observation. Art without ideas profits nothing. O. Henry got his ideas by seeing everything about him, by always keeping on the qui vive, as he himself said, for "the man around the corner." Fate dealt him a life of manifold experiences, and from every experience his store of observations increased. After all, his works are no more than an artistic record of life as he saw it.