Monday, Sep 20, 2021 • 57min

347 The Prisoner and His Prize - The Story of O Henry (with Jenny Minton Quigley)

Play Episode

William Sidney Porter (1862-1910) packed a lot of life into his 47 years, traveling from a childhood in North Carolina to work as a rancher and bank teller in Texas to a desperate escape to Honduras, where he hoped to avoid federal prosecution for embezzlement. Eventually he spent three years in prison, where he began writing short stories under the name "O. Henry." By the time he emerged he was nationally famous, and his subsequent years in New York City, where he wrote "The Gift of the Magi" among many other popular stories, were highly productive. After his death, his friends started a prize in his name, and today the annual prize - along with the volume of prizewinning short stories - has become a fixture on the American literary landscape. In this episode, Series Editor Jenny Minton Quigley joins Jacke to discuss O. Henry and the prize in his name, which has been retooled for 2021. Jenny describes the fiction she and her colleagues reviewed, the state of the American short story, and the influence that this year's guest editor, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, had on the finished product, The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to The History of Literature, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding literature, history, and storytelling like Storybound, Micheaux Mission, and The History of Standup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Talking about

Speakers

(2)

Jacke Wilson

Jenny Minton Quigley

Transcript

Verified

Break

Jacke Wilson

00:39

Hello! In 1910, a woman named Ida Louise Crossley arrived at

the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration

Fifth Avenue

in 29th Street in

New York City

. It was the day of her wedding, and she was impressed by the large crowd that had assembled outside. Some friends quickly rushed her away to a hotel dining room, suggesting that this might be a better place for her to wait until the arrangements at the church were finalized.

01:07

What they did not tell her was that there had been a mix-up. The church had accidentally been double booked that day, with both a funeral and a wedding scheduled to occur at the same time. The guest, when they arrived, were asked if they were there for the funeral or the wedding. Funeral goers were rushed inside to pay their last respects. Wedding attendees were diverted to a nearby church garden.

01:33

The wedding eventually proceeded without incident, but the funeral was affected as laughter and chatter floated into the church from the wedding guests outside, turning a dour occasion into unframed by excitement and happiness.

01:50

It was a twist worthy of the beloved short story writer,

O Henry

, famous even today for his surprise endings because as it turns out, the man in the coffin that day was none other than

O Henry

himself, it was his funeral. One suspects that he would have approved, all the more so because the lightness of his surprise twists sometimes concealed just how grim and gritty his stories were.

02:17

He wrote about real people in real life, in plain language, a language and sensibility consistent with his own life. He may have dressed up his stories with comic turns and needs surprises, but his life was tough and had twists of his own. He began writing as

O Henry

in prison and ended up one of the most successful writers in

America

02:41

We still celebrate him today. Including, with one of the more August literary institutions we have in

America

. The

New York

review of books began in 1963, giving you some context of the age of some of these institutions.

02:59

The National Book Award For Fiction

began in 1950 which was two years after the

Pulitzer Prize For Fiction

, which was first awarded in 1948.

The New Yorker Magazine

dates back to 1925.

The O Henry Prize For Short Stories

is older than all of those. It started in 1919 and ran continuously, with a one-year break last year for retooling.

03:28

Now it's back with guest editor

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

and series editor Jenny Minton Quigley, who joined us earlier this year. She's back today to tell us about the retooling and the results as we dive into the life and legacy of

O Henry

today on the history of literature.

03:57

Hey hello everyone. Welcome to the show. I am Jack Wilson. I'm so glad you're here today. Thank you for joining us.

O Henry

today, the man known as

O Henry,

real name

William Sydney Porter

. Born on September 11, 1862. Died at the relatively young age of 47 in 1910.

04:26

In the meantime, a lot of living in a lot of writing if he's known today at all. I think it's for three things, and all three are related. He's known for short stories. All three things have that in common short stories was surprised, twist endings, but specifically these are the three things I think he is best known for today.

04:47

The first,

The Gift of the Magi

. This is the short story. Its beloved. I'm pretty sure it made it onto our list of Greatest Christmas Stories of all Time, that we did one year, the draft. That Mike and I did, maybe it was number one.

05:01

No, actually I don't think it could have topped

The Nativity Scene

if we counted, that probably didn't top

Scrooge

either, at least not if I was picking. Anyway, that episode had the most mistakes that The History of Literature Podcast episode has ever had, I corrected them subsequently. But a lot of people miss the correction. I still get emails about that episode once in a while.

05:24

Mike might have been indulging in a bit of spicy eggnog before he joined us that day. I think, who knows? We record those things with Mike at midnight. He was probably dipping into some Christmas cheer. I don't know, I don't care. It was the season Mike can indulge.

05:44

Anyway,

The Gift of the Magi

, that's the story of the poor young couple who are in love in

New York City

around the turn of the century. She sells her beautiful long hair for $20 in order to buy her husband a chain. A chain that is for his prized possession, his watch, which is so proud of. Only to learn that he has sold the watch in order to buy her a Christmas gift, which is a set of combs to use with her beautiful long hair, which she no longer has. It's not quite as famous the story as

Scrooge

A Christmas Carol

, but it's up there.

06:22

It's also been a like

Scrooge

, it's been adapted a million times and parodied a million more times.

The Honeymooners

took their shot at

The Gift Of The Magi

Sesame Street

The Muppets

Steve Martin

in his book Cruel Shoes more recently,

Phineas And Ferb

Family Guy

and the list goes on and on.

06:41

It's such a well-used trope by now. It doesn't even necessarily have to be at Christmas. A lot of times you see in these parodies or these adaptations of it is just gifts. I give you this gift, you give me that gift. And we didn't realize our signals were crossed.

07:00

But isn't it the thought that counts. Isn't it beautiful in some ways that we were both so giving, we didn't need to get in order to realize how much we loved one another. It's hard to remember when we didn't know the ending to the story, the surprise twist.

07:17

And yet it's still a fairly readable story. In fact, it's read aloud every year, or it was at Pete's Tavern in

New York City

, where it's reputed that

O Henry

wrote the story, he once lived across the street from Pete's Tavern. Mike and I, by the way, once held an impromptu meeting of the literature supporters club at Pete's Tavern. We've also met at the

White Horse Tavern

Dylan Thomas's

Old Haunt, and of course

The Algonquin

07:45

Okay, number two is another story

O Henry

is famous for. Also with a twist, also much admired and adapted and parodied

The Ransom Of Red Chief.

A story about kidnappers who steal a wealthy man's son, only to find that the kid is so unrelentingly mischievous and annoying that the father is reluctant to pay for his return. And in the end, the two men pay, they pay the father to take the kid back.

08:17

These are classic short stories, the kind of story with the kind of clever ending that younger readers come to love. And in fact, they view these as the whole point of a short story in some ways, why not have a big twist at the end. For grown-ups, twists like that endings like that have become a bit of a cliché and after Joyce at least, stories in English don't really end like this anymore. Not in serious literature, life doesn't work so neatly. We don't need stories with the equivalent of a trombone playing notes at the end of a melodrama.

08:53

Just like, we don't need villains twirling their mustaches. But that's not to say that

O Henry

doesn't deserve his spot in the history of the short story. Even if we now sort of use an

O Henry

ending is a way of saying a little primitive, a little too pat, a little too neat, a little too pandering.

09:14

O Henry

deserves a spot in our history of literature first of all, because these were very popular stories. This was an era when stories came out each week. Before

Netflix

, of course, before the internet, but also before television and radio, really before cinema. Closer to Dickens's era than our own families got these stories in the mail each week, in publications like

The Saturday Evening Post

. And when they weren't sitting around staring at the fire or reading the bible to one another or doing whatever they did, they had these stories to read.

09:50

One can imagine families enjoying these stories with their whiz bang endings and maybe running out to buy the collections of

O Henry's

stories too. He was a bestseller in his day, but there's another reason for resurrecting

O Henry

a bit, which is that he was very good at what he did. Even setting aside his supremacy as the crafter of endings, that we no longer value quite as much as a stylist. Someone who wrote with local color, with witty narrators and fast-paced prose. He's up there with

Ambrose Bierce

and

Jack London

and even

Mark Twain,

and he loved

New York

New York City

, which to him was endlessly rich and endlessly fascinating.

10:33

He was the opposite of a snob. We have a great example of a snob from his era. A guy named

Ward McAllister

who took a look at the growing

New York City

and said, well, guess what? A lot of people here, but there are only 400 people worth noticing.

10:51

These are the people he said, who matter who count the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Joneses, the Whitneys, you know the names. And he said, this guy McAllister said, if you go outside this list, this was his quote, "If you go outside this list of 400 you will encounter people who either are uncomfortable in a ballroom or who makes other people uncomfortable."

11:19

What a snob. He wasn't the best list maker, as it turned out. He said, I'm going to print my list of 400, and he only had 265 names on it and a bunch of them were dead. I don't know about you, but the people I hang around would be somewhat uncomfortable at a ballroom if someone dead rolled in. But in any case, the point here is that

O Henry

was deeply offended by this Mr

Ward McAllister

in his list of 400, the only 400 people worth noticing.

11:49

O Henry

entitled his book the four million and said I've got a bigger range here. I notice others. All these people have stories, all four million of them. They're struggling and living and loving and dying there, scraping by and trying to figure out how to buy each other Christmas presents and look at the love and humanity, they're among them. Look at them, look at these people, Not just 400, 4 million. Look at them with warmth and good humor and compassion.

12:25

And that is why we can talk about the third thing,

O Henry

is known for today, which is the prize in his name, and not be embarrassed that we no longer value his nifty endings the way we once did.

O Henry

was more than just his endings. He was a writer capital W And he looked for stories and people, real people, not just the ones who traveled in ballrooms. Although there are stories there too. Thank you,

Henry James

, and thank you,

Edith Wharton

, for giving us those stories. But if we have a choice between 40o and 4 million, we'd be fools to limit ourselves to the smaller number, literature is bigger than that and so are we when we're at our best.

13:05

Okay, so let's hear more about

O Henry

and then a special treat. We will hear from the series editor of

The O Henry Prize For Short Stories

, Jenny Minton Quigley who's here to talk about putting together the 2021 version, which is out now a good Christmas gift by the way, put it on your list, chances are the reader in your life won't have it yet. And a collection of short stories by 20 different authors is sure to have something for everyone.

13:32

But before we get to the

O Henry

and the

O Henry

Award, let's hear a listener email or at least part of one. This comes to us from Liz in

Hawaii

13:40

"Hi Jack, the arts and our loves save us." Rights, Liz.

13:47

She says,

"Covid

isolation started when I had been living in a new place for nine months in

Hawaii

is having a terrible surge of Delta, during this I have read, made collages, written and listen to music and podcasts to lighten my sorrow. I'm happy to say my mother turned 90 in June, so we had a small family party, and she had fun getting another tattoo on her head."

14:12

Liz goes on to say that "She cried when she listened to The History of Literature episode on

Frederick Douglass

Learning to Read, because reading has been so central to her life." So thank you, Liz, for this email. I want to go back to the sentence I kind of passed by, which I'll paraphrase it, as "My 90-year-old mother got another tattoo on her head."

14:34

It reminded me of those sentences, made me think of those sentences where you change things by emphasizing a single word like the centers might be, "Mike gave Evie a book," and you can say, "Mike gave Evie a book," or "Mike gave me a book," or "Mike gave Evie a book," "Mike gave Evie a book," or "Mike gave Evie a book," five different meanings, all from the same five words as you emphasize one word over the other.

15:12

I read the email kind of like that. My mind kept emphasizing different parts of the sentence. Your mother got a tattoo? Your 90-year-old mother got a tattoo? Your 90-year-old mother got a tattoo on her head? Your 90-year-old mother got another tattoo on her head?

15:33

I am clearly missing the party by not living in

Hawaii

if I've said that once, I've said it 1000 times, but I hear you on the Delta Variant and I know Hawaii is not alone in going through a pandemic resurgence. We are all with you wherever we are. Please do stay safe and happy birthday to your mother.

15:52

Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with

O Henry,

whose wildlife gusto for short fiction and continuing legacy make him a surprisingly enduring figure.

Break

Jacke Wilson

19:37

William Sydney Porter

was born in

Greensboro, North Carolina

. He went to school where his aunt was a teacher, and he worked in his uncle's drugstore. When he was 20 or so, he set out for

Texas

hoping that the warm, dry climate would help him with a persistent, cough, he had.

19:54

He found work as a ranch hand where he learned Spanish and German to help him communicate with the immigrants around him, and where he read classic literature at night to help while away the hours. He got a job as a cook for a while and a babysitter and another job at a drug store, he was a licensed pharmacist, he played the guitar and the mandolin and sang in the church choir and was known for serenading young women around town.

20:21

Eventually took a position in a land office, drawing maps and then worked as a teller at a bank in

Austin

. We'll have more on that a lot more in a moment. He got married to a wealthy 17-year-old who had tuberculosis. This was against her parent's wishes and the two of them had a son who died young and a daughter who lived, and

Porter

started writing humorous sketches. He was in his mid 20s now, and he started up his own publication called, The Rolling Stone, which flopped.

20:51

Maybe that's a terrible name for a magazine, who could ever imagine a magazine called Rolling Stone with a title ever amounted to anything. Anyway, The Houston Post snapped him up after that, and he drew cartoons for them, and he reported the news, and he wrote columns.

21:06

Houston

he like to hang around hotel lobbies and get stories from the travelers and the other people hanging around. And then In a bizarre twist when he was 35 years old. His old job at the bank in

Austin

came back to haunt him. He had been a careless bookkeeper, and suddenly he was indicted for embezzlement.

21:31

His father-in-law posted his bail, but

Porter

was terrified of the trial. And so when he was on his way to the courthouse, he took advantage of a change of trains. He, he took that as his opportunity to jump bail and flee to

New Orleans

and from their escape to

Honduras

. In

Honduras

, he wrote his first short story collection, which he called,

Cabbages And Kings

, and he became friends with a notorious train robber.

22:02

I mentioned

The Gift Of The Magi

I and

The Ransom of Red Chief

has two things he's famous for, but he also coined the phrase, "Banana Republic," which he was basing on what he saw around him in

Honduras.

And he popularized the character of the Cisco kid.

22:18

Anyway, the plan was to have his family meet him in

Honduras,

where he was planning to stay now that he was a wanted felon. But alas, his wife who had always been supportive of him was dying of tuberculosis. Now he returned to

Texas

to see her and was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for the embezzlement. He served three years, got out early for good behavior.

22:46

During those years, he was writing stories, and before he was released, his prison stint was not too arduous thanks to his experience as a druggist and maybe his reputation as a writer, he was treated pretty well. He worked in the prison hospital as the night druggist, and he was allowed to write stories.

23:06

He took on the name

O Henry

at this point, which may have been named after a prison guard,

William Trevor

thought so anyway. And big time publications like McClure's were publishing his stories with no idea that they were being written by a prisoner.

23:24

Was he a felon? Was he guilty? It's not clear. He later claimed he was not only innocent, but he had been set up to cover for the crimes of others. I don't think historians have settled on an answer to that.

23:39

While he was waiting trial, his wife had died and when he was released, he reunited with his daughter who was 11 now and living with her grandparents in Pittsburgh. From there, the two of them moved to

New York City

, so

Porter

now called

O Henry

could be closer to the publishing world that was gobbling up his stories, he was cranking them out.

24:01

Now, this was 1902, and he really settled into his groove able to draw upon his life experiences, days on the ranch, his time in

Honduras

, his time in prison, all the people he'd met along the way and also all the buzz and crackle of the

New York City

around him as it continued to grow and thrive.

24:22

Five years later, he got married to his childhood sweetheart, but he didn't have many years left at this point, he was drinking a lot and his writing started to suffer. His wife left him after only a year or two of marriage, and he died a year after that. He was 47, but he lives on.

24:43

After his death. His friends got together and started up the

O Henry

Prize for Great American Short Stories. In 1919, the awards began, edited for several years by the formidable

Blanche Colton Williams,

who herself deserves an episode of the history of literature.

24:59

Blanche Colton Williams

was the sort of person who went to a women's college in the south and so impressed her fellow colleagues that alumni of the college took up a collection to send her to graduate school to study literature. She landed at Columbia University, where she became a writer and a literary historian.

25:22

She got the prize, the

O Henry

prize off to a great start as she headed up the committee of prize selectors and the series, as I mentioned, continues to this day. So speaking of which, let's take our final break and then return with Jenny Minton Quigley, who serves as the series editor for the

O Henry

Prize Awards.

25:44

Will hear the nuts and bolts of gathering these stories, judging them, compiling them into a collection and making them available to the world. Year after year, after year, all that and more after this.

Break

Jacke Wilson

27:06

Okay, joining me now is Jenny Minton Quigley, series editor for The

O Henry

Prize Winners for 2021. This year, the vaunted collection of prizewinning short stories was guest edited by

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

and this was a relaunch with a couple of major changes that we will ask Jenny about. Jenny was here before to discuss her family's connection with

Vladimir Nabokov

and the classic 20th century novel Lolita. Jenny Minton Quigley, welcome back to The History of Literature.

Jenny Minton Quigley

27:35

Thank you for having me, Jack!

Jacke Wilson

27:37

Okay, so here we go, the best short stories of 2021. But before we get to the stories, let's start with you, when and how did you get involved with the

O Henry

Prize?

Jenny Minton Quigley

27:48

I got involved in the

O Henry

Prize back when I worked at Vintage Anchor, which was in the early 2000s. At that point I was the in house editor for the

O Henry

series and Larry Dark was the series editor.

28:02

And then Laura Furman came on after him and she had a wonderful round of about 17 years, and then she wanted to move on onto some new project. And The team at Anchor took a year off after Laura resigned because they wanted to rethink the anthology, and then they invited me in to serve as the 10th series editor to help plan a relaunch.

Jacke Wilson

28:24

Right, okay, so they made two major changes for the relaunch. Let's start with works in translation and in some ways, I'm not sure if I should ask you why they're being included now or why they weren't included before. But anyway, what's the thinking behind expanding the selection to include translated stories?

Jenny Minton Quigley

28:44

Well, it happened at our very first brainstorming meeting about the relaunch, and we were considering what we could learn from the better known the best American short story series, but also how we could differentiate ourselves from it, not just be a little sister. And one of the ideas we had was to move away from system specifically American story.

29:05

At the time, it was a couple of years ago and

Trump

was still in office,

President Trump

and I don't think we were especially feeling proud about being American, and we wanted to open our minds to literature around the world. And the literature that writers had originally imagined in their own language.

Jacke Wilson

29:21

Right.

Jenny Minton Quigley

29:21

And you're right. But the second we decided to do it, we thought, why haven't we done this earlier?

Jacke Wilson

29:26

Well, I can tell you that in preparation for this. I went back and looked at the very first,

O Henry

short story collection prizewinning short story collection in 1919 and the editor wrote a wonderful introduction there, her name was

Blanche Colton Williams,

and she noted in her introduction that the unfortunate prohibition on Non-Americans had led to at least three worthy the stories that they were unable to consider.

Jenny Minton Quigley