The time was barely 10 o'clock at night, but chilly gusts of wind with a taste of rain in them had well nigh de-peopled the streets. Though some readers feel that the twist shows an overly sentimental view of the human condition, many readers enjoy the way O. Henry's stories affirm the best things about the human condition. It was quite usual for him to ramble carelessly afield, making sundry vague remarks about the attitude of the Columbia College professors towards grammar and the plagiarism he is contemplating, and then to lament that, in thus sparring for an opening, he has forgotten to follow Aristotle's directions! There are no allusions to Adam losing his chance at peace in Eden, no references to wealth's inability to wash away the crimes that made a man rich. 15 Apr. Bob's hands tremble when he reads Jimmy's note at the end, but O. Henry does not tell readers if that trembling is from anguish or rage. It was after reviewing The Four Million for the Pittsburgh Gazette that George Seibel heard from one of his associates the story of the silver dollar which Porter had borrowed when he was preparing to move from Pittsburgh to New York. Henry Ward Beecher, who is reported to have said that when the English language got in his way it didn't stand a chance, had a worthy disciple in O. Henry. ", The Classics point up the weather in "the January blasts (were) making an Aeolian trombone of the empty street" and "the Aeolian chorus of the wind in the house crannies." He was a kind of plodder, though, good fellow as he was. Fingerprinting, which uses traits that are unique to the individual, is introduced to the United States in 1906. 2021 . This shift in the interest of the literary community was foreseen by Hyder E. Rollins, who complimented the writer's use of slang in his dialog in a 1914 article in the Sewanee Review, stating that "in his unexcelled mastery of slang our author was quite effective." In the United States, critical praise for O. Henry faded at about the same time that his general popularity began to wane. After twenty years. I get a story thoroughly in mind before I sit down at my table. "I'm just waiting for a friend. O. Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter, made a name for himself with his unexpected 'twist’ endings, and many consider "After Twenty Years" to be one of the best examples of this literary technique. For these readers, there is no rule, written or unwritten, that says that literature must be deep. After listening to the story, the cop walks away. 2, Spring 1914, pp. After Twenty Years 125 Imagine you’re trying out for the part of narrator on a TV program presenting this story. He was not . "That nasty old North River?" 1906: Criminals are identified by their appearance. He leads Bob off to a place he knows of without indicating what that place might be. Short Stories for Students. The note was rather short. Since he is not Bob or the arresting officer, it makes sense that he would be the only other character. The character who does the most talking, Bob, seems to be genuinely enthusiastic about seeing his old friend Jimmy. The second twist comes as a bigger surprise, and it is deftly played. A policeman walks along the block, testing the doorknobs of businesses, making sure that they are locked and secure against burglars. Now, before we go on to the station here's a note I was asked to hand you. The South was an agricultural power that was still weakened after the Civil War thirty-five years earlier. "After Twenty Years" is a short story written by O. Henry, first published in his anthology, The Four Million in 1906. ", A New York waiter-philosopher states the case for the educated man: "All the heroes on the bum carry the little book. One of Saki's best-known stories, "Tobermory," is about a cat who develops the power of speech and ends up telling all of the secrets of the residents of a, O. Henry's colorful life story has fascinated generations of his fans. You see, the West is a pretty big proposition, and I kept hustling around over it pretty lively. More importantly, though, is the fact that Jimmy knows, as he listens to Bob reminisce about his old friend, that he will have to have Bob arrested. The plainclothes officer, not given a name in this story, is sent to trick the criminal known by the Chicago police as "Silky" Bob by pretending that he is Jimmy Wells. Moreover, divorce at any stage of life is not easy. There is a ship, the Ariadne, and a coal-black horse is named Erebus. It's either Tantalus or Liver or Horace, and it's printed in Latin….". Indisputably this is attractive, though one feels that it is unwarranted, that the author has taken an undue advantage to secure humor. Slang is ephemeral. We haven't had a parodist with so subtle a knowledge of his craft, so inclined time and again to initiate the reader into its mysteries, probably since the time of Laurence Sterne. He has a good explanation for why he is there, however, and he seems comfortable in the presence of the police officer who is on the lookout for suspicious activities. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, who made his reputation as a scout, put together a carnival-like traveling show that purported to bring the Wild West experience to cities. The truth is O. Henry failed to take himself and his art seriously. I hope Jimmy has done half as well. Thus, in O. Henry's hands the short story undergoes regeneration, becoming a unique composite of literary feuilleton and comedy or vaudeville dialogue…. Many of his stories are marred by local and contemporaneous allusions that in a few years will be pointless and vague…. He lived on the ranch for two years and then moved to Austin, where he spent several years working a variety of jobs, including real estate agent, draftsman, and teller at the First National Bank. That O. Henry's piquant audacities of style are attractive is indisputable, but they are certain to lose their piquancy and to lower his rank in literature. Sentimental stories—stories about New York shop girls or others of the type of "Georgia's Ruling"—predominate in the years immediately following his imprisonment (though they do also appear later). ", "I should say not!" His hand was steady when he began to read, but it trembled a little by the time he had finished. The light showed a pale, square–jawed face with keen eyes, and a little white scar near his right eyebrow. In later stories, such as "The Unprofitable Servant," he makes no ‘bones’ of confessing that he wrote thus in order "to swell the number of words" for which he was paid. This book shows how O. Henry was influenced by the time he spent there in his formative years. Reginald in Russia (1910) objected Hetty. I believe the moral of O. Henry's "After Twenty Years" is that people change and grow apart. I thought at first he was going to swear vendetta on the blade of it, or recite ‘The Gipsie's Curse.’ The few feuds I had ever seen or read about usually opened that way. And so on. Hansen, Henry, "Foreword," in The Complete Works of O. Henry, Doubleday, 1953, pp. Encyclopedia.com. When it corrals man in lonely ranches … the snow makes apes and tigers of the hardiest. He strove only to arrest the momentary attention of the rapidly moving mass of readers. It has forbidden the man to enter. The limited point of view stays with him when the officer leaves, so readers do not know that the first officer has gone to phone a plain-clothes officer. An Unreconstructed Rebel, who asserts that "the Confederacy is running along as solid as the Roman empire," informs a Yankee in "Two Renegades" that "we sent a good many of ye over to old mortuis nisi bonum. In another story ("The Ransom of Mack"), two friends carry on a conversation from which it is possible to conclude that Mack is getting married (a conclusion that Mack's friend does make). Furthermore, the story suggests that friendship can be powerful enough to make a criminal like Bob sentimental for the days before his financial success, showing his faith in the Jimmy Wells that he remembers. At the end of the story, the focus shifts from the character who has been the center of attention all along to the character who has been absent throughout, Jimmy Wells. The Chroni…, O'flaherty, Liam Words must be coined to express his thought, or the usual meaning of words must be distorted; O. Henry did both without compunction. The enduring popularity of O. Henry has given him a degree of public recognition that is unusual for a writer. Today: New York's population tops eight million at the turn of the twenty-first century. Bob explains why he is there, and Jimmy, who needs no explanation, listens for a while. Henry is either exceedingly terse or ironic: "Old Jacob Spraggins came home at 9:30 p.m., in his motor car. "Bless my heart!" His responsibility to the law takes precedence, and he arranges to have Bob arrested, though his emotional bond is still strong enough to prevent him from making the arrest himself. It would be absurd to say that the inherent value of his work was not primarily the cause of his popularity, for although slangy mannerisms might attract readers, the latter will not be held if there is not something worth while in the stories themselves; and it seems improbable that the public will soon change from an enthusiastic to a Laodicean temper. Source: Hyder E. Rollins, "O. Henry," in Sewanee Review, Vol. "He was a lucky man … even though he were imitating the Spartan boy with an ice cream freezer beneath his doublet frapéeing the region of his heart." By comparison, the final plot twist is weak; it is somewhat unexpected, but just not very interesting. The stories lack compactness, the language is without wit, the structure without dynamism. This was, of course, an easier feat for a writer to achieve back then, before the age of electronic communication, when newspapers were a primary source of popular entertainment. ." For half an hour he sat silent, and then he turned around, rather surprised to find me still there. Then, abruptly and unaccountably, Porter came alive, and in the light of the second half of the evening and of later meetings Mrs. Woodrow wrote: "I am sure that if his table-talk had ever been taken down in short-hand, it would have sounded very much like his written dialogue…. The sentimental bond between them is so strong that Jimmy cannot arrest Bob himself, so he leaves and sends another officer to do it. In "After Twenty Years," readers do not discover that Bob is a criminal until the last few lines of the story, when he is arrested. ", "It sometimes changes a good man into a bad one," said the tall man. Readers never learn what crimes "Silky" Bob is wanted for in Chicago, only that he is established enough as a criminal to earn a criminal nickname. This applies with particular frequency to descriptive passages about which, as we have seen above, O. Henry maintained an invariably ironic attitude. It is highly characteristic of O. Henry's general parodic bent that he frequently takes problems having to do with literary practice itself as themes for his stories, making theoretical and ironic comments on matters of style and now and again having his say about editors, publishers, reader demands and so on and so forth. Come on, Bob; we'll go around to a place I know of, and have a good long talk about old times.". "Bill," my curiosity was up, "does your mind feel a blank when you sit there like that?" not blinded by hero-worship and popular esteem, discloses at best an occasional brave peep at life, hasty, superficial and dazzlingly flippant: an idea, raw, unassimilated, timidly works its way to the surface only to be promptly suppressed by a hand skilled in producing sensational effects. Russian readers unfortunately miss all of this as they also do, for the most part, those instances of play on words in O. Henry's crime stories which are motivated by the speaker's illiteracy (for example, confusion of scientific words as in the case of "hypodermical" instead of "hypothetical"). 78: American Short-Story Writers, 1880-1910, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel and William E. Grant, Gale Research, 1989, pp. A twist of plot, which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance, is typical of O. Henry's stories. Porter eloped with her in 1887, and they went on to have three children, though one died soon after birth. More serious writers, including William Sydney Porter (who would go on to write as O. Henry), Mark Twain, and William S. Hart brought interest in the lawless frontier into the literary salons of the East. "After Twenty Years 담당구역을 순찰중인 경찰은 인상 깊게 거리를 이동했다. These characters, although each characterised significantly different, all play a vital role within the reading of the text. The more adequate similes include: as proud as Cicero; as proud as Julius Caesar; triumphant as Minerva; as simply as Homer sang; as big as the Iliad; quiet as a street in Pompeii; more like a dark horse than Pegasus; and crying like Niobe or Niagara. His wit was urban, sophisticated, individual…. How has the West treated you, old man? Because he is in New York for a legitimate purpose, to see a friend from before his days as a criminal, Bob does not think about the fact that he is wanted by the police. It was while he was in prison in Columbus, Ohio, that Porter began writing in earnest. The man briefly explains that he has been busy in the West trying to make his fortune. Arrival of Police officer The Classics find a broad range in O. Henry. [O. Henry's characters] are described by their actions, or by brief, trenchant sentences that are hurled at our heads, as "He wore heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon." Jimmy is a conscientious officer in several ways. Monkkonen, Eric H., Police in Urban America, 1860-1920, Cambridge University Press, 2004. The story “ After Twenty Years ” by O. Henry’s revolves around the themes of love, trust, expectation, sympathy and sacrifice. He summarized the fading of O. Henry's reputation this way: "That O. Henry's piquant audacities of style are attractive is indisputable, but they are certain to lose their piquancy and to lower his rank in literature. Sometimes it is a twist of fate, but sometimes the twist is a piece of information that was not previously available to the reader and that sheds a new light on all that has come before it. By the 1880s, the West's reputation for lawlessness had been absorbed into popular culture and was even glorified by it. The twist made his stories entertaining at a time when readers looked to stories to be entertained. 209-211. "There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as Helen of the Troy laundries." 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