O. Henry was the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, an early-twentieth-century author known for creating short, often humorous stories with ironic twists or surprise endings, a type still referred to as "the O. Henry style." Porter's critical reputation climbed to dazzling height between 1910 and 1930, and he was touted as the most popular short story writer in American literature, the equal of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and other great short-fiction writers. Then his reputation plummeted, falling throughout the 1940s and 1950s to an equally unrealistic low, his technical virtuosity dismissed as flashy trickery and his social consciousness as shallow sentimentality. Objective evaluations of Porter, which have been rare because of this extreme variance in his popular and critical reputations, have as well been complicated by his controversial life. Indeed, as Arthur W. Page recalled in The Country Life Press, even Porter's fiction is "tame compared with the romance...