Some American Story-Tellers, Frederic Taber Cooper (1911); Life of O. Henry, Peyton Steger (1911); O. Henry Biography, C. Alphonso Smith (1916). Magazine articles: The Bookman: The Personal O. Henry, 29, 345; 29, 579; O. Henry’s Shorter Stories, Justus Miles Forman, 31, 131; Sketch of O. Henry, 31, 456; Representative American Story-Tellers, Harry Thurston Peck, 31, 477; O. Henry in His Own Bagdad, G. J. Nathan, 31, 477. North American Review, 187, 781.
THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF[23]
BY O. HENRY
Introduction.
Setting and characters.
A favorite form of humor with O. Henry.
It looked like a good thing; but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama—Bill Driscoll and myself—when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment of temporary mental apparition”; but we didn’t find that out till later.
Setting more specific.
Satire of contrast—frequent with author.
2. There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.
The narrator is not consistently ungrammatical.
3. Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities; therefore, and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought The introduction develops the foundation of the Plot Situation gradually. to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things. We know that Summit couldn’t get after us with anything stronger than constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical blood-hounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers’ Budget. So, it looked good.
The humor takes the form of situation, diction, satire, and sly little surprises throughout.