SIDE-LIGHTS ON AMERICAN LITERATURE THE AGE OF O. HENRY I THE apparition of O. Henry is the most extraordinary literary phenomenon of the new century. He and Jack London emerged almost at the same moment, unheralded, full-grown, sudden: few arrivals in all literature have been so startling. Hardly had we learned his real name before he was filling the whole sky. He was William Sydney Porter, we were told, a native of North Carolina who had had wild experiences as a cow-boy on the ranches of the Southwest. He had been adventurer, we gathered, tramp, knight-errant of the chaparral in the roughest areas of that wildest West so swiftly passing into tradition, and now he had sent East stirring tales of adventure: another Bret Harte, up to date, breezy, original. And his earliest specimens in the magazines seemed to bear out the report. Then quickly had come a new sensation: this Western cow-boy had lived in New Orleans, had vagabonded through Honduras and South America, and he was bringing what no one had brought be 3 fore, wild exotic atmospheres and exciting adventure from uncharted realms to the west and the south of the Caribbean. At once he was hailed as Harte had been hailed and as Kipling, and as quickly Jack London was to be hailed, as a new sensation in a jaded age. That was in 1902. Then had come a sensation as startling as the first apparition: suddenly we heard that this cow-boy, this vagabond from South America, had become—amazing metamorphosis!—the interpreter of New York City; the Scheherazade of "Bagdad on the Hudson"; total stranger in New York, yet vouched for as doing for that world of a city what had been done for London by Dickens, who had spent his life there and who knew nothing else. "McClure's Magazine" had discovered him; a dozen other periodicals fought for his wares and secured them with loud trumpetings; the New York "World" named a figure that mortgaged for months his whole future product: a story a week, for its Sunday supplement, just as a generation before "The Atlantic Monthly" had purchased for a year the pen of Bret Harte. Then at the height of his powers suddenly he vanished: dead at forty-eight. He had come like a comet; he had filled the whole sky; he had disappeared like a comet. That was in 1910. But the paradox of O. Henry had hardly begun. Stories written for the Sunday supplement are as ephemeral as the comic section which they neighbor, but these ephemera were to outlast even the classics of the "Atlantic." Some volumes of them were collected even during the headlong six years of his productiveness, but with his unexpected death there came a scramble to secure every scrap of his product for a subscription set. He had been enormously creative. During the two years following "Cabbages and Kings" he had produced 115 stories, and his total product, almost all of it the work of six years, was 250 pieces, not counting the scraps in a thirteenth volume of his set. And now came the second stage of O. Henry, O. Henry as a subscription set advertised with all the latest enginery of the art like a soap or a breakfast-food, guaranteed creations of a genuine "Yankee Maupassant," books with "stories that will live as long as speech": "England has her Dickens, France her Hugo, and America her O. Henry." When the sales began to slacken a set of Kipling was thrown in free, and later still, after another lull, a set of E. Phillips Oppenheim, seven quivering volumes, with an offer of $500 in prizes for the buyers writing the best letters descriptive of the thrills in a "collection of thrills unparalleled in literature." And the public responded—is even yet responding to a degree that staggers the imagina |