Perhaps the reputation of no other American writer has undergone a more rapid and drastic reversal than that of William Sydney Porter. Writing under the pseudonym O. Henry during the first decade of the twentieth century, Porter commanded a readership in the millions. Critics spoke of "the Yankee Maupassant," discussed Porter in the same breath with Gustave Flaubert, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and regarded him as "the master of the American short story." C. Alphonso Smith declared in 1916 that "O. Henry's work remains the most solid fact to be reckoned with in the history of twentieth-century American literature." "The time is coming," Canadian critic Stephen Butler Leacock wrote in the same year, "when the whole English-speaking world will recognize in him one of the great masters of modern literature."

Soon after Porter's death in 1910, however, the serious literature was removing The Four Million (1906) and The Trimmed...