Publisher
Penguin, paperback
O Henry was born William Porter in North Carolina in 1862 and he died in New York in 1910.
The Cop and the Anthem is the perfect introduction to a playfully florid writer whose stories charm endlessly but also reveal home truths about the human psyche.
You can sense the man from out of state in his stories of New York. The outsider figure is almost omnipresent, such as the vagrant trying in vain to get arrested so he can winter comfortably in prison in the title story.
Squaring the Circle deals with the fall-out from a Kentucky feud which began between neighbouring farmers, the Folwell and Harkness families. Eventually, there is only one scion of each clan alive, namely Cal Harkness and Sam Folwell. Cal lights out for the bright attractions of New York, shaking the Cumberland dust off his feet, as it were. A year after his sudden departure, Folwell learns the whereabouts of his hereditary, unsuppressed enemy.