SOURCE: “The Rise of the Journalistic Short Story: O. Henry and His Predecessors,” in The American Short Story: A Critical Survey, University of Oklahoma Press, 1973, pp. 114–26.

In the following excerpt, Voss offers an overview of O. Henry's short fiction and describes “The Gift of the Magi” as “a little parable with a significant meaning.”

By the end of the nineteenth century the carefully made, ingeniously plotted story had become a well-established tradition, but it was during the first decade of the twentieth century that the type was carried to its ultimate lengths in the stories of O. Henry. None of his predecessors exploited the contrived story with quite such deliberate calculation or with more facility, and none achieved anything like the phenomenal popularity of O. Henry, who produced his stories for mass-circulation magazines and newspapers with the intent, as he put it, of pleasing “Mr. Everybody.”

O. Henry...