Cabbages and Kings

Written by O. Henry

Narrated by LibriVox Community

This work is O. Henry's first published volume and is considered to be his only novel. The plot is composed of several short stories, which were inspired by the author's six-month stay in Honduras in the late 1890s.

"The incidents embracing as they do, a variety of subjects, hang loosely together, so loosely in fact, that at times one finds no apparent connection between them at all, and yet in the end one sees how each is intimately related to the other. ...Written by a less able hand than O. Henry's the book might have been a sad jumble, perhaps comprehensible to none but the Walrus--but as it is, one finds a joy in its every obscurity." -- The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 17, 1904)

Great mysteries are ofen meta-mysteries. For over a century this novel has masqueraded as a collection of loosely connected short stories. Looking backwards through a prism (now a commonplace critical contortion) Cabbages and Kings foreshadows many shadings: "At Swim-Two-Birds", "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", "Tyrants Destroyed", "The Continuity of Parks". -- Elliot Gage

O. Henry spent his first years as a writer in Austin, Texas, and the University of Texas maintains a 219-item collection of his works at the Portal to Texas History (reference to publicly-available items which may not be in public domain offered to enthusiasts). — Eric W. Metzler

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

O. Henry

O. Henry (1862-1910) was an American short story writer. Born and raised in North Carolina, O. Henry—whose real name was William Sydney Porter—moved to Texas in 1882 in search of work. He met and married Athol Estes in Austin, where he became well known as a musician and socialite. In 1888, Athol gave birth to a son who died soon after, and in 1889 a daughter named Margaret was born. Porter began working as a teller and bookkeeper at the First National Bank of Austin in 1890 and was fired four years later and accused of embezzlement. Afterward, he began publishing a satirical weekly called The Rolling Stone, but in 1895 he was arrested in Houston following an audit of his former employer. While waiting to stand trial, Henry fled to Honduras, where he lived for six months before returning to Texas to surrender himself upon hearing of Athol’s declining health. She died in July of 1897 from tuberculosis, and Porter served three years at the Ohio Penitentiary before moving to Pittsburgh to care for his daughter. While in prison, he began publishing stories under the pseudonym “O. Henry,” finding some success and launching a career that would blossom upon his release with such short stories as “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) and “The Ransom of Red Chief” (1907). He is recognized as one of America’s leading writers of short fiction, and the annual O. Henry Award—which has been won by such writers as William Faulkner, John Updike, and Eudora Welty—remains one of America’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Reviews for Cabbages and Kings

[Joseph Gonzalez · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

one of the only complete collections of O. Henry, I have found jumbled collections here and there but as I decided to read all of his amazing stories I found nobody had recorded a complete, chronological, book by book format. hopefully this helps