Two Famous American Short Story writers double team the world's second best short story writer

"The Story of a Farm Girl" by Guy de Maupassant (1884, 9 pages)
"War" by Sherwood Anderson (1921, 6 pages)
"The Girl and the Habit" by O. Henry (1905, 5 pages)

Whose Story is Best?

Guy de Maupassant (1850 to 1893-France) is often listed, behind Anton Chekhov, as  the second greatest short story writer in the world.    He certainly was one of the most prolific with over 250  stories to his credit.     O Henry (1862 to 1910-USA) is famous for his "surprise ending" short stories like "The Ransom of Red Chief" and "The Magi".    He is very much an American writer and the leading annual American short story award is named for him.     Sherwood Anderson (1876 to 1941-USA) is most famous by far for his linked collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio.    Readers of O Henry like his work, they chuckle at the ones with good endings, where readers of Anderson love his work and are shocked by the sheer depth of his seemingly simple stories.   Today, just for fun, I will look at a story by each of these writers (not their best but I will explain why I picked them) and decide which one has the most merit and give some reasons.

"The Girl and the Habit" by O. Henry is third best, no way around this he is out of his class here.   "The Girl and the Habit" is set in a restaurant in the financial  district in New York City.    O Henry does a good job of describing the restaurant and its clients.   Most of the trade is at lunch and most of the customers are men who work in the area.   The cashier is totally beautiful.   All of the men flirt with her as they pay their checks.   She puts them off in a friendly bantering way that O Henry shows us.   How he does it is OK but could be better done.   One day a wealthy financier passes out in the restaurant.   When he wakes up the first thing he sees is the beautiful cashier.   He and his wife ending up adopting her and training her in all the social graces and she dreams of a lofty marriage.   They give her classes to refine her speech so she sounds like she is strictly upper class .  Then one day she is at a big charity even where earls and dukes  are in abundance.   She has been assigned to a both where she will sell items for charity.   An earl who she and her new parents want her to marry comes up to pay her for an item.   The girl does as a total flash back and speaks to him in her best "streets of Ne York" accent and when he asks her to dinner treats him just like she did the patrons in the restaurant.   As you read the story you are pretty much waiting for the surprise ending.   I found it a bit flat, the characters are one dimensional and the social satire kind of weak.   Not a horrible story but not close to "high art".     I read this story because it was one of the stories of the day at East of the Web:  Short Stories.

"The Story of a Farm Girl" by Guy de Maupassant is our second place story.   It goes into some detail about the farm woman who is the central character in the story.   As we meet her  she awakes from her nap in the barn to find she is being molested by Jacques, one of the farm hands.     She pushes him away and then they go for a walk together during which Jacques declares his love and says he wants to marry her.    She falls in love with him based on this.   When she finds she is pregnant and reminds Jacques of his promise he tells her he just said that to get her into bed and laughs.    Compressing a bit, he shortly disappears.   She has her baby at her mother's house (who dies when the premature baby is born) but she gives it to a neighbor to raise.    She returns to the farm and is a tremendous farm manager in dealing with vendors and such.   The widowed farm owner offers to marry her.  She says no, then He rapes her and then she agrees to marry him.   Six years go by and they have violent fights because she never gets pregnant and he wants a child very badly.    After a very bad fight she tells him she already had a six year old child.   The man is overjoyed and says he wanted to adopt a child since they have not had one.   All the fighting is forgotten and they are both totally happy now.   This story made me feel sympathy for the woman but  it is too sentimental and the ending does not seem right.   I am not sure what to make of rape as prelude to marriage, if it was normal or not but I have read enough of de Maupassant's stories to know he has a thing for robust women with large breasts.    You can easily find this story online.

"War" by Sherwood Anderson (from his collection The Triumph of the Egg) shows us that there is for sure more to Anderson than Winesburg, Ohio:  A Group of Stories of Small-Town Ohio Life.   I think it is clearly the best of these stories.

Pretty much every one who reads Anderson likes his work but some are, I think, put off  from reading his work by the setting of his stories.  "War" is set on a train in the USA.   The time is the years right after WWI.    There are two characters basically in the direct story (there is a story within the story-not easy to do well in six pages but he does).   One is an American man and the other is a Polish woman with a bad facial injury who is sitting near him on the train.   He talks to her a bit, she is traveling with a man who is asleep, and she learns the woman is a refuge from the war in Europe.   She begins to tell the story of how she escaped from Europe.    During the war, she was part of a group of refugees who were being directed toward a camp by a fifty year old German professor drafted into the war efforts.    In a very strange event  open to various readings the man gets into a terrible fight with a quite old refuge woman and seemingly their spirits cross.   The woman takes on the role of the man and the man acts just as the woman had done.   He says over and over he just wants to be left alone and will not move.   The old woman takes tight control of the refuges and leads them on and the man stays behind.   In the confusion the Polish woman and her lover steal some paper work and end up escaping to America (no details given as to how they do this).    I think this is the best of the stories as it does not try to force an emotional response from us.   It makes us think about what really happened during the transfer of spirits in the fight.   "War" is a deep look into how a conflict changes the lives of a few people who never wanted any changes in the first place.   I was happily lead to read it when it was the short story of the day at AmericanLit.com (they have 1000s of short stories on hand and good reading suggestions also).   Anderson makes his characters come to life by showing us small details about their faces, their clothes and such.   He does not tell us how to feel about what happens.   There is great power in what he leaves out

This not meant to suggest that Anderson is a better writer than de Maupassant for I do not think that at all.   Of de Maupassant I think you either have to get some help to find and read his best or just accept you will read some stories that are just formulas and some that are wonderful.

I am always happy to get suggestions for short stories I might like.

Mel u

Three Surprise Ending Short Stories-American, English and French

"Two Thanksgiving Day Gentleman" by O. Henry (1905, 6 pages)
"Cousin Theresa" by Saki (1908,  5 pages)
"The Adopted Son" by Guy de Maupassant (1881, 4 pages)

Ocean Hopping with Three Surprise

Ending Short Stories

Magazine editors have had a lot to do with the way the short story has developed.   During my reading project on short stories of the Australian Bush (Outback Tales from 1870 to 1920 or so) I found the Australian short story first began to blossom when a nationwide weekly publication, The  Bulletin,  began to  publish short works of fiction about "real life" in the Australian outback.   The stories had to be of a certain length and style to be accepted.    During Irish Short Story Week I became aware of how important The New Yorker has been for sustaining the quality of the Irish Short Story.    The standards of the magazine were high and so was the pay.

In India, The Hindu published many of the short stories of R. K. Narayan and others.    They imposed length requirements on their writers and catered to readers whose first language was not English.    Magazine editors liked surprise ending short stories or for sure they thought that is what magazine buyers wanted.   The modern short story almost began to develop in revolt against the surprise ending short story.    This morning I want to spot light three surprise ending short stories by three very famous short story writers.

"Two Thanksgiving Gentlemen" by O. Henry (1862 to 1910-USA) is a classic surprise ending short story.   (There is some background information on O. Henry in my prior posts on him.)   Almost the whole point of the story is building up to the surprise ending.   I sort of saw it coming but not totally.   The story opens on the very American holiday of Thanksgiving.    The central character of the story is a homeless man.    We never learn how he wound up homeless.    For the last nine years a man  has found him on his park bench on Thanksgiving day and taken him out to an elegant Thanksgiving Day lunch (it is a big feasting day).    O. Henry does a great job of bringing the mysterious benefactor to life.   We learn this annual gift of a lunch is the biggest thing in his life.     Maybe the surprise ending is very sentimental and half predictable but the story is worth reading for the people it creates.   O. Henry some times seems like he is just going through the motions of pleasing his editors but there are moments of real brilliance in his work.

All of O.  Henry is in the public  domain.    I read this story HERE.   You can find nearly all his stories online.

"The Adopted Son" by Guy de Maupassant (1850 to 1893-France-he  wrote about 300 short stories) is a classic surprise ending, tear the rug out from under you short story.     Maupassant is often listed as the world's second best short story writers, right behind Anton Chekhov.   (There is some background information on him in my prior posts on him.)      Maupassant supported an expensive life style through the sales of short stories and novellas.     He wrote to please the public and magazine editors.   A number of his short stories (I have read 14 of them since I began my blog  on July 7, 2009) do seem like they were written by a formula and rely on melodrama and the evoking of feelings of guilt for their power.   A lot of them are surprise ending short stories.   At his best he a great master of the genre.   As the story opens we meet two poor country families who had sons about the same time.
Both families struggle to survive.   One day a wealthy woman passes in her carriage and the lives of one of the families is changed forever while the second family endures on in resentment of their luckier neighbors.    There is sentimentality about the poor in France in Maupassant for sure.   At the ending of the story a terrible surprise is brought down on one of the families but I did not really see it coming.   This is a decent story and though not a work of genius.

You can read "The Adopted Son" HERE

"Cousin Theresa" by Saki (Henry Munro-1870 to 1916-UK)  is very much a typical Saki surprise ending short story.   (There is background information on Saki in my prior posts on him.)     Saki's stories are normally gentle social satires on the foibles of the upper and middle classes in Edwardian England.   Nobody is poor in his stories, unlike those of  O. Henry and de Maupassant.    There is no playing on guilt and little real characterization.    The pleasure of his stories, which is very genuine, is in his elegant prose and the kind of "super smart child" feel that his stories seem to have.     His stories are fun.   Some will find the prose too mannered.    Some will lollipop there way to the end of a Saki story to see what the surprise ending will be.    "Cousin Theresa" is a pretty self indulgent story.     It is about a father and his two sons.    One of the sons has just returned from a long posting at some remote place in the British Empire.  The son had some sort of big accomplishments or other.    His other son seems to be a lay about who devotes all his time to scribbling out plays.   The father tells himself, "OK one of my sons may be wasting his life but at least the other will bring the family fame through his governmental service."     The slacker son's play "Cousin Theresa" gets preformed on the stage in front of the Royal family.   I bet you can probably see the ending coming now.   "Cousin Theresa" exists pretty much just for the surprise ending.   It takes only a moment or two to read it and it will make you smile (and feel smart if you see the ending coming).

You can read "Cousin Theresa" HERE.

What are your feeling about "surprise ending" short stories?

Mel u

Stories by Anton Chekhov, O. Henry, and Raymond Carver-

"Misfortune" by Anton Chekhov (1885, 16 pages, translated by Constant Garnett)
"Nobody Said Anything" by Raymond Carver (1988, 12 pages)
"A Municipal Report" by O. Henry (1909, 19 pages)

Three Short Stories by Masters of the Form

O. Henry, Carver, and Chekhov

This morning I want to briefly post on three very different short stories by writers considered among the greatest of all short story writers.    

Almost everyday I check out East of the Web:Short Stories to see what has been selected as the short story of the day.   Normally they have one story from a high status author and one story that may not be real well known.   They often have new stories as well.   It was here I first discovered Katherine Mansfield.   If you have some time to read and cannot think what to read, you might check out this web page.     One of their stories of the day yesterday was "A Municipal Report" by O. Henry (1862-1910-USA-There is some background information on him in my prior posts on O. Henry.)   I saw it was 19 pages and I at first thought that I did not want to read a 19 page story just to find out what the surprise ending might be.   Then I recalled Jhumpa Lahiri had said he was one of the geniuses of the short story.   I did some quick research and saw this story is often considered O. Henry's masterpiece.   I hate to gush too much but this story is a quantum leap better than his other work.    It is a work of genius that belongs among the world's best short stories.   If all of O Henry's stories were this powerful nobody would think it was odd or patronizing to include him with Chekhov and Carver as a master of the short story.   This story is about a traveling representative for a publishing house on his way to Nashville to renegotiate a contract with one of their authors.    The characters in this story are whole people, not the semi-cartoon like characters in the other stories by O. Henry I have read.   The characters are beautifully realized.   There are some surprises in this story-maybe four of them-I loved them all.    I know a lot of people are not going to be willing to read a 19 page O. Henry story, I almost did not.    In my after read research I read that people say that if O. Henry was not a bit lazy and did not have to please magazine editors, then this is the kind of story he really was meant to write.  

You can read "A Municipal Report" HERE

"Nobody Said Anything" by Raymond Carver (USA, 1938-1988-his very last short story was about the death of Anton Chekhov-it is flat out brilliant) is included in a collection of his short stories (32 in all) Where I'm Calling From" which contains many of his best stories.    In the last few years of his life Carver reread the short stories of Chekhov and many say that this experience pushed Carver into a richer vein.  (There is some background information on Carver in my prior posts).    There is one thing in this story that surprised me-no one drinks in it!    This story is about two brothers, their mother, their father (might be long time step-father) and a boy the older son meets when he goes fishing.   There is also a woman in the story who picks up the older of the boys from the road and gives him a ride while he fantasies she will give him more than that.   Carver is really good at adolescent sex fantasies.    This is a great story.   Carver shows what can be done with the short story form.    I was kindly given an e-book of  Where I'm Calling From by a very generous reader in New Delhi and will be reading and posting in at least a minimal way on the 29 stories in the collection I have not yet read.

Nearly everyone into the genre says Anton Chekhov (1860-1904-Russia) is among if not the very best short story writer in the world.     (There is some background information on him in my prior posts on him.)    "Misfortune"   is an acutely observed story about a man in love with or with a sexual obsession for the wife of a friend.    The real brilliance of the story is in the depiction of the wife and her reactions at various states in the relationship.

You can read "Misfortune" here.

All of these stories are very much worth your time.   If you are really into the short story and kind of look down on O Henry (OK I did before today) and can read only one of these three stories today, then  please read his and come back and tell me what you think please!

If you are hoping to be short listed for the 2012 Caine Prize award, read all the Carver you can.   If you confine yourself only to the greatest of  literature, then read the Chekhov story.  

Mel u

"Babes in the Jungle" by O Henry

"Babes in the Jungle" by O Henry (1903, 7 pages)

O Henry (1862 to 1910 USA-aka William Porter) is famous for his surprise or twist ending short stories.    Just as Saki is a very English writer of Edwardian England, O Henry is a very American writer of the 1910s.   The Wikipedia article on O Henry gives a good account of his life and career.    He lived a very interesting life.     He was a popular writer who wrote his stories for sale to mass market magazines, not elite literary journals.  

One of the themes of O Henry's stories seem to be tricksters getting tricked.   The stories also seem to deal with issues of supposedly smart city dwellers versus country hicks or recent immigrants.    Imagine the setting of the recent cable TV series show Broadway Empire and you will get an idea of his settings.  

As "Babes in the Jungle" opens we have two hucksters or confidence men talking about how easy it is to take advantage of residents of New York City.    They go on and on about how they even feel bad about taking their money through sales of phony gold mines and such.   They have just recently met and they are each trying to impress the other.    Then the fun begins when they meet J. P. Morgan, hyper wealthy banker.

The twist ending here is really well done.   This is to me a fun and funny story.

You can read this story  in just a few minutes at East of the Web:Short Stories.      Of Saki and O Henry, I guess I like Saki a bit more.    They are both good writers who make us smile and maybe reflect on our lives a bit.  

Mel u

"Ransom of Red Chief" by O Henry-USA/UK-Short Story Shoot Out-Round 2

Saki-UK-1870-1916

"Ransom of Red Chief" by O Henry (1910, 12 pages)

Round Two- Trans-Atlantic Battle of the Twist Ending Short Stories from the 1910s

O Henry representing the USA versus Saki representing the UK

O Henry-USA-1862-1910

(I am reading this story based on a suggestion of Risa of Bread Crum Reads that we read and both post in the same time frame on this story of O Henry and "Mrs Peckletide's Tiger"   by Saki.)


O Henry (his real name was William Porter-1862-1910-USA) is one of the most popular American writers of short stories.   His stories are famous for twist or surprise endings.   His stories are meant as good natured entertainment that almost anyone can appreciate.   The style is simple and straightforward and I did get the feeling O Henry had fun writing them.


O Henry's father was a doctor but in those days this did not mean what it does today.   O Henry's mother died when he was three, Saki's mother died when he was two.   O Henry died at 48, Saki at 46.    Both got their professional starts as newspaper writers. Both lived out side their home countries for a time.    O Henry left the USA to hide from the police (he came back and turned himself in when he heard his wife was dying)  and Saki went to Burma to work for the British police force!    O Henry struggled in a good part of his life to support himself and his family.   Saki came from a well off family and never suffered any financial anxieties.   O Henry spent five years in prison for embezzlement from a bank for which he worked as a teller.   He began to write seriously while in prison.    Upon release he began to publish one story a week and ending up with over 300 stories.    O Henry married twice (he was a widower). Saki never married.   O Henry had to make his own way in life and selling his short stories was a big part of how he made his living.    Saki was born in comfortable circumstances, not fabulously wealthy by any means but certainly he never had to sell his stories to pay the rent.    


 I am pretty sure ""Ransom of Red Chief" is the second most still read of O Henry's stories, with "Gift of the Magi" being number one.    As the story opens Bill and Sam, two fugitives from the law hiding out in the Deep South of the USA are trying to come up with a way to get $2,000 so they can use it to create a swindle involving fraudulent land sales.      They decide to kidnap the son of a local citizen, a man known for sharp financial dealings.  (The story is from a period when kidnapping for ransom was not seen as often a prelude to murder.   The famous kidnapping and murder of the son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh took place in 1932.)    The boy, known by his nickname of "Red Chief" does not know he has been kidnapped, he thinks he is on a camping trip and that Bill and Sam are local rubes his father hired to look after him for a few days.   Bill and Sam are not at all violent and it turns out they are in more danger from the antics of Red Chief than he is from them.  


I do not want to tell more of the plot as it is a lot of fun.    (Teachers should note that there is a use of a term that is very unacceptable today in the story.    This would perhaps make it unacceptable for class room usage in some political climates.   It does seem a bit mean spirited as it is used in the narrative of the story, not in conversation of the characters.    It is possible also some may find the use of the name "Red Chief" as politically incorrect.  These issues do not change the literary merit of the story, it is just something for teachers to consider.   In terms of content this story could be taught to 5th graders and up, I think).


Of the two writers I like Saki best.   The stories of O Henry are fun and well written in an anybody can read style.   I just prefer the prose style of Saki.   Saki's stories have more of an ironic tone and seem to involve more of a social satire. This, of course, does not make them better!   The people in the stories of Saki seem more educated and better off economically than those in the stories of O Henry.  In the stories of O Henry, fate seems to play a trick on the characters whereas in the stories of Saki one of the characters seem to provide the twist ending.  




"The Ransom of Red Chief" can be read online.


Mel U

"The Gift of the Magi" by O Henry

"The Gift of the Magi" by O Henry (1906-3 pages, read via Dailylit.com)

O. Henry (pen name for William Porter-1862 to 1910-North Carolina, USA) is best known as the author of some 300 short stories.   "The Gift of the Magi" may well be the most assigned to be read short story in American schools.     O Henry led a trouble life.    Wikipedia has a good article about him.   One interesting trivial pursuit item I learned from it was that O Henry created the term "banana republic" to describe the country of Honduras (where he was hiding from charges of bank embezzlement-for which offense he did serve five years in prison) and it has now entered the common language to mean a small unstable tropical country in Latin America.   

"The Gift of the Magi" turns on a twist or surprise ending as it seems do many of his short stories.    The story opens in the early 1900s at the small very modest apartment of a young married couple, Jim and Della.   The setting is a large American city.   O Henry does a very good job of making us able to visualize the apartment.   We can see the Jim and Della very much love each other.   Christmas is coming and each one of them very much wants to give the other a wonderful present.    Anyone who has ever been short of money at Christmas with loved ones for whom you cannot really buy  the gifts you long to will directly relate to this story.  I do not want to spoil this story for those who may have not yet read it.   The style is somehow relaxing.   Perhaps his stories do depend to much on the surprise ending and cynics would say they have a schmaltzy feel but this one was fun to read and the time invested was worth it for sure.    

Here is a sample of his prose style:

The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

I am glad I read this story and think most readers of my blog would find it a pleasant easy read.