Book title : New Yorkers ─ Short Stories
Author : O. Henry
Retold by : Diane Mowat
Publishing house : Oxford University Press
The novel belongs to a series named "Oxford Bookworms Library".
This simplified edition was published on 2000.
What make a city different from another city? Is it the building, the weather, the people? It is the people who make a city, and if you want to know a city, you must know its people. You must know what make them laugh and cry, know the small detail of their everyday lives. This book contains five O. Henry's famous short stories which is sensitive, funny and sympathetic, and give us vivid pictures of the everyday lives of these New Yorkers. The five stories separately are "The Christmas Presents", "Soapy's Choice", "A Walk in Amnesia", "Tildy's Moment" and "The Memento". These shows that a housewife, a tramp, a lawyer, a waitress, an actress ─ ordinary people living ordinary lives in New York at the beginning of twenty century. The city has changed greatly since that time. Cities grow bigger with the years, new buildings are put up and old buildings are pulled down, horses are replaced by cars and buses, fashions change. But people do not change a lot; people are much the same. The New Yorkers in these stories are very different from each other. Some are rich, some are poor, some are happy, some are sad, some have found love, some are looking for love. But the hopes of a tramp are as important as the hope of a lawyer; the love of a waitress is as exciting as the love of an actress. And we see that people's hopes and fears and dreams do not change with the years.
O. Henry which is the author's pen-name, and his real name is William Sydney Porter. Porter was born in North Carolina, USA, in 1862. When he was twenty, he went to Texas where he worked in different offices and then in a bank. In 1887 he married a young woman called Athol Estes. He and Athol were very happy together, and he at the same time he began writing short stories. His most famous story is "The Gift of the Magi" (in this book called "The Christmas Presents"), and many people think that Della in this story is based on his wife Athol. In 1896 Porter ran away to Honduras because people said he stole money from the bank when he was working there in 1984. A year later he came back to Taxes to see Athol, who was dying, and in 1898 he was sent to prison. During this time there he published many short stories, using the name "O. Henry", and when he left prison in 1901, he was already a famous writer. He then lived in New York until his death in 1910. Porter's stories are both sad and funny, and show a great understanding of the everyday lives of people like shop girls and office workers. He wrote about six hundred stories and made a lot of money, but he was a very unhappy man. When he died, he had only twenty-three cents in his pocket, and his last words were: "Turn up the lights; I don't want to go home in the dark."
I just finished first story and I am going to reading the second story. I think the story is close to our people's daily lives, and there are some happy things and some sad things in story, just like we would meet in our lives. Next time after I finish the book, I will share you my feeling about the stories. And I will keep going with my reading.
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