Henry. Inspired by his experiences as a fugitive and in prison, these stories address themes of poverty, persecution, and hope.The Four Million refers to the population of New York City, where O. Henry was living at the time of its composition. Containing twenty-five works of short fiction, the collection includes several of the author's best-known stories. "The Gift of the Magi" is a heartwarming story of a young married couple who struggle to afford gifts for one another in the days leading up to Christmas. Delia, placing her husband's happiness before her own, sells her own hair in order to afford a platinum pocket watch chain. When she returns home, however, she finds that Jim has made a similar sacrifice. In "The Skylight Room," a typist named Miss Leeson tries to find work while renting the smallest room at Mrs. Parker's boarding house. In a moment of quiet desperation, she names a star "Billy Jackson" while staring out of the room's tiny skylight, a view she soon struggles to afford. "The Cop and the Anthem" follows a homeless man named Soapy. As winter approaches, he commits a series of petty crimes in order to be taken to the shelter of jail. When his attempts fail, however, he discovers that justice has a cruel way of revealing itself. The Four Million, one of O. Henry's finest works, is an exemplary collection of short fiction that showcases the author's empathetic and hopeful outlook on poverty and American life. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of O. Henry's The Four Million is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    It explains how he had been the provider for the household for then and how his childhood was almost nonexistent. The story starts with him being 12 at that time having already lost his innocent and had the irritability of an old man. In all of his job he was terribly efficient being described as a machine many times. Even when one of his siblings became old enough to work his mother made sure he stayed in school laying all the responsibility to Johnny. As this continued one day when he was 16 he had to stay home sick for a couple days after which he decided he was done moving and just wanted to do nothing for the rest of his life after which he boarded a train and left his family.

    This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.

    Perkins, a sharper who is actually from Chicago, prides himself on being able to sell anything through advertisements, whether swampland, canned cream cheese, or a novel that has yet to be written. Includes "Mr. Perkins of Portland," "The Adventure of Mr. Silas Boggs," "The Adventure of the Lame and the Halt," "The Adventure of the Fifth Street Church," "The Adventure in Automobiles," "The Adventure of the Poet," and "The Adventure of the Crimson Cord."