O. Henry

O. Henry, born William Sidney Porter, is best known today for his short story The Gift of the Magi. But that legacy doesn't begin to capture the genius and the extraordinary range of a gifted humorist who deserves to be ranked among the best in our literature, alongside Ring Lardner and James Thurber. As Carl Van Doren wrote in 1917, no writer in the language seems clever immediately after one has been reading O. Henry.

Here are 101 of O. Henry's very best short stories--selected and expertly annotated by best-selling author Ben Yagoda--including not only such favorites as The Ransom of Red Chief and The Last of the Troubadours but also The Caballero's Way, which created the character of The Cisco Kid, a murderous desperado in O. Henry's telling, and The Cop and the Anthem. This volume represents stories from all of O. Henry's collections, including the Honduras stories published in Cabbages and Kings while Porter was hiding there to escape an embezzlement indictment, as well as the most generous selection ever published of O. Henry's New York (which he called Baghdad-on-the-Subway) and Texas stories. Also gathered here are previously uncollected stories, and five published here for the first time.