In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I look at a new collection of O. Henry's short stories, and why this writer—once so immensely popular he rivaled Mark Twain for the world's affections—has fallen into comparative obscurity in today's literary culture. Excerpt:
At the height of success, Porter suddenly died—at forty-seven, of diabetes aggravated by his extreme alcoholism. His whole career had lasted less than a decade. Four years later, World War I broke out, and the spirit of the era he had so perfectly expressed seemed to vanish. Later generations of literary scholars would view his works primarily as historical curiosities.
That cultural shift began with what Van Doren called the “Revolt from the Village,” a literary movement whose practitioners—Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis—replaced O. Henry’s fondness for small-town characters with skepticism and even contempt. This was especially true of Anderson. “There was a notion that ran through all story-telling in America,” he said, “that stories must be built around a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion that they must point to a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens, etc.” Anderson rejected these ideas, instead designing his stories to reveal the “absurd fancies” that “went on in secret within [people].” His 1919 book, Winesburg, Ohio, imitated the fix-up device of Cabbages and Kings but focused on the perversities, neuroses, and frustrations of the residents (Anderson called them “grotesques”) of a fictional midwestern village. It proved enormously influential and helped drive American literature toward a cynicism from which it has never entirely recovered.
The decades that followed witnessed new waves of naturalism and anti-idealism under authors such as William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Richard Wright, and Arthur Miller. It’s likely that many of their descendants—for instance, Richard Yates, whose 1961 Revolutionary Road put a contemporary spin on Sinclair Lewis; or Nathan Halpern, whose 2020 television series, Tales from the Loop, is modeled on Winesburg, Ohio—are unaware that they work in the shadow of a movement that was reacting against O. Henry.
Other writers, however, took a different view of O. Henry’s romanticism....
Comments policy