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Elective English—III

Notes of the beloved characters around which hum one’s unanswerable questions. (If you want to see
what I mean, read “The Skylight Room.” One of the cruellest, yet most delightful endings in
American literature.) It is here too that O Henry captures the American spirit in its paradox: he
ignites in his reader the American willingness to love fully and quickly, to embrace life and
humanity, while imbuing the beloved with American restlessness, her mesmerizing, and heart-
breaking pioneering spirit. However, he tells is all with a wink and a smile, lest the tragedy be
too heavy; the poignancy is not lost in humour, just softened and shortened, made more palpable
for his ever so American audience.

12.4 Publishing History

Eight years after O Henry’s death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later
known as the Society of Arts and Letters) held a dinner in his honour at the Hotel McAlpin in
New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a committee met at the
Hotel Biltmore in December 1918 to establish an O Henry memorial. The committee decided to
award prizes in his name for short-story writers, and it formed the Committee of Award to read
the short stories published in a year and to pick the winners. In the words of Blanche Colton
Williams (1879–1944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial intended to “strengthen
the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.”
Doubleday, Page & Company was chosen to publish the first volume of O Henry Memorial
Award Prize Stories 1919. In 1927, the Society sold to Doubleday, Doran & Company all rights to
the annual collection. Doubleday published The O Henry Prize Stories, as it came to be known,
in hardcover, and from 1984–1996 its subsidiary, Anchor Books, published it simultaneously in
paperback. Since 1997 The O Henry Prize Stories has been published as an original Anchor
Books paperback.
Over the years, the rules and methods of selection have varied. As of 2003, the series editor
chooses twenty short stories, each one and O Henry Prize Story. All stories originally written in
the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for
consideration. Three jurors are appointed annually.
The jurors receive the twenty prize stories in manuscript form, with no identification of author
or publication. Each juror, acting independently, chooses a short story of special interest and
merit, and comments on that story. The goal of The O Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen
the art of the short story.

12.5 A Lickpenny Lover: Story

There were 2,000 girls in the Biggest Store. Masie was one of them. She was eighteen and a
saleslady in the gents’ gloves. Here she became versed in two varieties of human beings – the
kind of gents who buy their gloves in department stores and the kind of women who buy gloves
for unfortunate gents. Besides this wide knowledge of the human species, Masie had acquired
other information. She had listened to the promulgated wisdom of the 1,999 other girls and had
stored it in a brain that was as secretive and wary as that of a Maltese cat. Perhaps nature,
foreseeing that she would lack wise counsellors, had mingled the saving ingredient of shrewdness
along with her beauty, as she has endowed the silver fox of the priceless fur above the other
animals with cunning.

For Masie was beautiful. A deep-tanned blonde, with the calm poise of a lady who cooks butter
cakes in a window. She stood behind her counter in the Biggest Store; and as you closed your
hand over the tape-line for your glove measure you thought of Hebe; and as you looked again
you wondered how she had come by Minerva’s eyes.

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