The title of Rolling Stones, invented by Harry Peyton Steger, is based on the weekly, The Rolling Stone, published by O. Henry in Texas in 1894 and 1895. It contains odds and ends; some stories written when O. Henry was at his best, “The Fog in Santone,” for example; material used in the original The Rolling Stone; excerpts from the Postscripts column written for the Houston Post; and a few letters. Postscripts by O. Henry, as the name suggests, contains material taken from Will Porter’s Houston Post column. The Four Million is based on New York life, and The Trimmed Lamp, The Voice of the City, and Strictly Business are simply “more stories of the four million.” Heart of the West is made up exclusively of western stories. Cabbages and Kings, a composite of several individual stories separately published and now woven together, depicts life as O. Henry saw it in Honduras, Central America. The Gentle Grafter is supposedly based upon stories which O. Henry heard his fellow prisoners relate in the Ohio Penitentiary. The other volumes are made up of stories varied in character—New York, Texas, and tropical America.
Just as every other great artist has done, O. Henry has set an example. He invented a short-story technique of his own, and the most discriminating critics have studied that technique and pronounced it good. He owed no more to the “unity of impression idea” of Poe than to the stringy structure of the medieval Patient Griselda. Almost by chance, it seems, he hit upon the trick of concentration of attention, economy of words, rising suspense, and dénouement of climax and surprise; and in that trick lies his art.
There was in O. Henry, however, a power greater than his art. That was his genius for observation. Art without ideas profits nothing. O. Henry got his ideas by seeing everything about him, by always keeping on the qui vive, as he himself said, for “the man around the corner.” Fate dealt him a life of manifold experiences, and from every experience his store of observations increased. After all, his works are no more than an artistic record of life as he saw it.
The stories that make up the present volume have for forty years remained unnoticed in the files of the Houston Post. The general belief that O. Henry was simply a columnist on the Post is probably the reason for their being overlooked. The idea that his column appeared regularly has, furthermore, tended to dismiss the question of what sort of work he really did on the paper. When I examined the files of the Post, I was surprised to find that the column “Some Postscripts” was often missing. In February, 1896, it came out only four times, in April seven, in June three. In spite of this irregularity Will Porter’s salary had gradually been raised from $15 to $25 a week.
Here is a situation which has only one logical explanation. O. Henry must have done other work in order to draw this steadily increasing weekly salary. A close examination of the Houston Post files from October 19, 1895, to June 22, 1896, reveals a mass of material, heretofore unidentified, as unmistakably the work of Will Porter.
What first attracts the eye is the abundance of unsigned comic drawings and clever cartoons. The style of these drawings is unquestionably O. Henry’s. We know from various sources that he was constantly drawing pictures, and we have a positive statement from Colonel R. M. Johnston, under whom Will Porter worked on the Houston Post, that his ability to draw cartoons was called into requisition soon after he joined the staff of the Post. Some of the best of these cartoons depict the political situation of the time. Others are entirely independent of politics and point to the development of the present-day comic strips in all newspapers. Sometimes they portray character traits and are accompanied by rhymed quips. At other times they are used to illustrate lengthy stories. These stories, of course, were composed by Will Porter, and from them the selections for this volume have been made.
The word-usage, sentence-structure, mythological allusion, plot-manipulation, character types, and central ideas that characterize O. Henry’s short stories generally, are also plainly recognizable in these selections from the Houston Post. For example, “A Tragedy” not only turns on a pun, as O. Henry’s stories often do, but is based upon the story of The Arabian Nights, which later colored O. Henry’s whole conception of New York City, Little-Old-Bagdad-on-the-Subway. The central idea of “An Odd Character,” the story of a tramp who claims to be 241 years old, appeared later in “The Enchanted Kiss” and “Door of Unrest.”
The characters of these earlier stories—shop-girls, Irish policemen, crooks, tramps, sheep-men, cowmen, drunkards, pharmacists, doctors, newspaper reporters, dudes—are practically identical with many of those used in later O. Henry stories.
Likewise, O. Henry’s propensity for the use of the “envelope structure,” the sort provided by the pilgrimage in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and “narrated development,” or the telling of the story by one of the characters, is very much in evidence in these Houston Post stories, as in a number of his later acknowledged works. For example, in “The Mirage on the Frio” a sheep-man from La Salle County tells his story to a group of men on a Buffalo Bayou fishing party; and later in Cabbages and Kings the story of “The Shamrock and the Palm” is told by the Irishman Clancy to a group of fellow Caucasians who have met at the end of a tropical day.