The Gentle Grafter - O. Henry

Is it really 100 years since The Gentle Grafter was first published? Not that I was around at the time, you understand, but it was a book I grew up with and it never occurred to me that it was already half a century or so old by then. Re-reading it today, I can readily see that it's jam-packed with coeval allusions and expressions that place it as precisely in its pre-First-World-War era as would carbon-dating of the original manuscript. But as a boy, without that historical perspective, I was just enthralled by the timeless entertainment value of the stories. In fact, I grew up with a lot of O Henry, not just this one. In a bibliophilic family with ...  Read the complete review