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Unit 12: A Lickpenny Lover by O Henry

with two ships full of the no longer necessary seeds, expecting to sell them to the factory he Notes
imagines must somehow use them”(American Writers Supplement). Johnny and the factory
owner pout the cockleburs down on the beach. They put them down on the beach in order for
people to buy shoes. After they make a lot of money, Johnny leaves the island. The person who
grows the cockleburs now was stuck with much too many of them. Johnny now out of the
country, because he realized that there was no more demand of shoes so he got out while he still
would make money. Now everybody in the country had shoes to walk around in so there feet
would not hurt.
Elements of style are important devices in helping authors put great emphasis on important
issues in their stories. It also helps prove an author’s point while writing a story. This is shown
throughout many of O Henrys short stories by the example of poverty. O Henry has put great
emphasis on the two important elements of style in his short stories, which is theme and irony.
In the stories written by O Henry, many of them have shown different examples how the
element of theme came to bring about ironic endings.

Task Read the Gift of Magi and The Ransom of Red Chief and critically analyse them.

12.3 O Henry and the American Spirit

If you ever feel you have lost your faith in the great American Romance, take a glance at the life
of her brilliant short story writers, William Sydney Porter. He is proof of every aspect of the
American dream – a self-educated man, jack of all trades, inhibiter of all frontiers, he lived the
stories he so ingeniously crafted. Even the tragedies of his life have the glint of Romance: he fled
to South American from accusations of embezzlement, returning later to certain imprisonment
to comfort his beloved wife as she succumbed to tuberculosis. Thoroughly American, however,
Porter did not buckle under his grief or his incarceration. He rebuilt his writing career from the
confines of his Texas cell under the pseudonym of O Henry, a name which rapidly became
synonymous with excellence in short stories, with the American spirit, with the vivacious,
expanding, and progressing age of the late 19th century in which he worked and lived.

O Henry’s style is mostly known for its surprising endings, but its brilliance extends far further.
His works are fully of literary and classical allusions that are never heavy or obtuse and ever
thoroughly American in their humour and assurance. He was the master of the witty, extended
metaphor, the friendly, conversational style, the crafting of characters with perfectly chosen
details that the reader feels immediately attached caught and transfixed in the brief moment of
life. He was truly the American Dickens – culling his characters from every corner of American
life, painting cowboys with as much veracity as he sculpted shop girls and New York clerks. Just
as with Dickens, his love of humanity that breathes life into his stories. A love so strong and so
contagious that these myriad of faces and facets of the American soul with which he fills his
stories become beloved friends, members of a quirky family. One is certain, having lived
awhile in his pages, to have walked the streets of the Great City on a summer night, unknowingly
flirted with debutant posing as a shop girl, shared coffee and a smoke with reformed criminals,
and breakfasted on pancakes amid tumbleweeds and coyotes.
All of which makes O Henry’s signature twists so powerful. He sets your heart beating to the
story world’s pulse, enthrals you to their delightful reality, and, once you are caught heart and
soul, he lets you in on the secret and shuts the door. It is the shutting of the door, the drawing of
the curtains, the thrusting back into life that is at once so perfect and so devastating. One is shut
out of the whole story, left with insatiable desire to know What Happens Next. Not so much for
the sake of plot – a master of short stories, he timing and measure of plot is perfect – it is the fate

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