- Titles: Heart of the West, Sixes and Sevens, Strictly Business, The Voice of the City, The Gentle Grafter, Whirligigs, Rolling Stones, Roads of Destiny
- Author: O. Henry
- Publisher: Doubleday, Page & Company for Review of Reviews
- Estimated year of printing: 1912 / 1913
Notes:
“Authorized Edition”
Various copyrights
Primarily publication dates of 1913, except Strictly Business and The Voice of the City, 1912
Monogram: CAT
These are eight volumes out of what was likely a 12 volume set, reprintings of O. Henry’s collections of short stories.
William Sydney Porter (1862 – 1910), better known by his pseudonym O. Henry, was an American writer best known for his short stories. Many of his short stories have become classics that have are still well known. His most prolific writing period, during which his best-known stories were written, started in 1902. During this period, he wrote a story every week, published in New York World Sunday Magazine. These short stories were then collected into several collections.
This set of 8 are not the original publications of these collections, however they were published very shortly after O. Henry’s death, and some of them were actually published very close to the original publications. For example, the original publication of Rolling Stones was in 1912, this edition is from 1913.
O. Henry is best known for the Christmas story “The Gift of the Magii”, however that story is not included in this set of books. Still, these collections do include some of his classic stories. “The Caballero’s Way”, part of Heart of the West, created the character of The Cisco Kid, which spawned films, television shows, and comics. “The Duplicity of Hargraves”, part of Sixes and Sevens, also spawned a film and is considered one of O. Henry’s best short stories.
Review of Reviews was a monthly journal from 1890 through 1936, which included reviews of books and magazines and also running commentary of world events. It’s unclear to me what it means that this book series was published for Review of Reviews, but my assumption is that these were special editions made available to subscribers of the journal. The only other similar series I could find was a series of Kipling books published for Review of Reviews.