On O. Henry
This from a recent piece by Michael Dirda of The Washington Post:
“I first realized there was more to O. Henry than surprise endings when, a few years ago, I picked up a Penguin edition of the writer’s selected stories edited by Guy Davenport. In his introduction, Davenport — an essayist of the most sophisticated literary intelligence — noted that O. Henry’s reputation has long stood extremely high in Europe. Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the chilling 1924 dystopia We, found in his work “the art of brevity and speed proper to America,” while the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese praised the writer for the strange beauty with which he imbued city life, transforming turn-of-the-century New York into “Baghdad-on-the-Hudson.”
I don’t think “brevity and speed” are necessarily bad things in fiction. One of my grad school classmates teased other students who focused on short stories instead of novels. But sometimes less is more, and some people don’t have the concentration or time to read War and Peace. One of my favorite fiction books as a teenager was called Sudden Fiction, an anthology of extremely short stories.
More from Dirda’s review:
“Even though O. Henry revels in puns and wordplay, period slang and colorful rhetorical exaggeration, he keeps his narrative voice intimate and confiding. Its tone can be wry and sometimes even mildly Wodehousean…”
Henry stayed in a famous U.S. vacation/convalescence area for a while and joked it was difficult to do work there because the environment was so pleasant.
On another matter, it is Sept. 11 today. I said to a friend just after the terrorist murders happened that when the U.S. is being called “the world’s only remaining superpower” some people are going to hate it. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” –Thomas Jefferson