Short stories about love and loss in the Old West.

4/20/22

4/15/22

I've had this book on my shelf for some time, and I decided to pick it up and read it. It was a lot of fun. These stories are told from the heart. They are funny, warm, and all of them have a point to put across. A lot of the stories are about love--some about enduring love and others about love that is lost. The wry humour and the syntax of the language from that time make them totally believable. There are 18 stories in this particular book and I enjoyed each and every one of them. As always I like to pick a favourite out of the collection. It was difficult with this book as there were a few that stood out, but I think that The Caballero's Way was my favourite. It certainly was one of the most memorable. The story about the Cisco Kid and his lady love tugged at the heartstrings. O. Henry led a dissolute but short life, but that did not hamper his deep need to find romance. This comes out in his stories. There is a lot of love that comes out in these warm and wonderful stories, and they all paint a very clear picture of what life was like in the old West at the end to the 19th century.For a book that languished so long on my shelves, it sure came to life in my hands once I cracked the spine. ( )

[From Great Modern Reading, ed. W. Somerset Maugham, Doubleday, 1943, p. 464:]

Since in this section I have been dealing with the more or less illustrious dead, I think it is the proper place to state why I have forborne to include among them so famous an author as O. Henry. He was a prolific and popular writer, but he was very uneven, and his best stories are so well known that it seemed hardly worth while to insert one of them; and on the other hand I could not but think it unfair to him to put one in that was not equal to his best merely because it was less well known. And I think we are all rather tired of O. Henry. He made use of coincidence in a manner we are no longer ready to accept, and the surprise ending, which was his specialty, has by now lost its novelty. His technique has something of the effect of a conjuring trick you have seen too often, and his ingenuity, great as it was, cannot conceal the fact that his themes were few. There was little variety either in his characters or in his plots.