Fiction · 1908
The Voice of the City
Further Stories of the Four Million
The Voice of the City, first published in 1908, has been pulled into the Bibliomancer archive: the complete text, carefully cleaned and typeset, free to read online. Its editorial introduction is still being prepared.
Contents
- Note
- I — The Voice of the City
- II — The Complete Life of John Hopkins
- III — A Lickpenny Lover
- IV — Dougherty’s Eye-Opener
- V — “Little Speck in Garnered Fruit”
- VI — The Harbinger
- VII — While the Auto Waits
- VIII — A Comedy in Rubber
- IX — One Thousand Dollars
- X — The Defeat of the City
- XI — The Shocks of Doom
- XII — The Plutonian Fire
- XIII — Nemesis and the Candy Man
- XIV — Squaring the Circle
- XV — Roses, Ruses and Romance
- XVI — The City of Dreadful Night
- XVII — The Easter of the Soul
- XVIII — The Fool-Killer
- XIX — Transients in Arcadia
- XX — The Rathskeller and the Rose
- XXI — The Clarion Call
- XXII — Extradited from Bohemia
- XXIII — A Philistine in Bohemia
- XXIV — From Each According to His Ability
- XXV — The Memento
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1862–1910 · Victorian
O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), born in Greensboro, North Carolina, who worked as a pharmacist, ranch hand, bank teller, and draftsman before an 1894 audit of the Austin bank where he had worked found funds missing; he fled to Honduras, returned when his wife fell fatally ill, and was convicted of embezzlement in 1897, serving over three years in the Ohio Penitentiary. There, writing to support his young daughter, he began publishing short stories under pseudonyms, settling on "O. Henry" upon his 1901 release. Moving to New York in 1902, he wrote prolifically for newspapers and magazines — at his peak producing a story a week — building a body of work, including The Four Million (1906), Heart of the West (1907), and The Voice of the City (1908), known for its ironic coincidences and twist endings, and for finding sympathetic drama in the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. Heavy drinking and declining health marked his last years; he died in New York at forty-seven.
Adjacent records
