1906 · McClure, Phillips & Co., New York · 25 stories
Twenty-five New York stories, and the shortest of them takes five minutes
Read The Four Million online, free, from the April 1906 first edition. Shopgirls, cops, furnished rooms, a bum who wants to be arrested. “The Gift of the Magi” is story two and takes nine minutes. The whole book is about 202.
- Words
- about 48,000
- Whole book
- 202 min
- Stories
- 25
- Setting
- Manhattan, 1902–1905
- Price
- Free to read; packs quoted on request
Contents, timed
All 25 stories in the 1906 order, with reading minutes
The title answers a society man who said only four hundred people in New York mattered. O. Henry counted the census instead. Most of these ran first in the New York Sunday World between 1903 and 1905, one a week, which is why nearly all of them fit in a coffee break. Minutes are at 238 words a minute.
| No. | Story | Minutes | Where in New York |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Tobin’s Palm | 10 | Coney Island |
| 02 | The Gift of the Magi | 9 | An $8 flat |
| 03 | A Cosmopolite in a Café | 8 | A Broadway café |
| 04 | Between Rounds | 10 | A boarding house |
| 05 | The Skylight Room | 9 | A top-floor room |
| 06 | A Service of Love | 8 | A studio flat |
| 07 | The Coming-Out of Maggie | 9 | A social club dance |
| 08 | Man About Town | 7 | The streets |
| 09 | The Cop and the Anthem | 8 | Madison Square |
| 10 | An Adjustment of Nature | 7 | A cheap restaurant |
| 11 | Memoirs of a Yellow Dog | 6 | An apartment |
| 12 | The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein | 7 | A drug store |
| 13 | Mammon and the Archer | 9 | Fifth Avenue |
| 14 | Springtime à la Carte | 8 | A hall bedroom |
| 15 | The Green Door | 10 | Broadway at night |
| 16 | From the Cabby’s Seat | 9 | A hansom cab |
| 17 | An Unfinished Story | 9 | A department store |
| 18 | The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock | 9 | A park bench |
| 19 | Sisters of the Golden Circle | 8 | A sightseeing coach |
| 20 | The Romance of a Busy Broker | 6 | A Wall Street office |
| 21 | After Twenty Years | 5 | A doorway on the beat |
| 22 | Lost on Dress Parade | 7 | A restaurant |
| 23 | By Courier | 5 | A park |
| 24 | The Furnished Room | 10 | The lower West Side |
| 25 | The Brief Début of Tildy | 9 | A beanery |
Read chapter one online
“The Gift of the Magi”, first paragraph
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi”, The Four Million, New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1906, p. 16.
Editor’s note on O. Henry’s slang
O. Henry was William Sydney Porter, a former bank teller from Greensboro who served three years in an Ohio penitentiary for embezzlement and came out writing. He reached New York in 1902. The Four Million was his second book and the one that made the money.
His vocabulary is the hard part. He mixes Bowery slang with Latin tags and words he half-invented. “Bulldozing” meant bullying in 1906. A “hall room” is a narrow bedroom at the end of a corridor, the cheapest in the house. We gloss about 140 words in the margin and change none of them. Modern school anthologies often quietly trim the long openings of these stories, the paragraphs where he talks to you before the plot starts. We don’t. That talk is half the pleasure.
Prices are 1906 prices. Della’s $1.87 and the “$8 per week” flat are left as printed, and the margin gives no conversion, because every conversion you’ll find online disagrees with the next one.
Content notes
Period ethnic caricature in several stories, dialect included. Poverty treated as comic material. “The Furnished Room” ends in a suicide. Nothing is cut or softened.
- 2024-05-06
$1.87One dollar and eighty-seven cents. An earlier digital source had converted the words to figures. The 1906 text spells it out, twice. “The Gift of the Magi”, p. 16 - 2024-06-18Restored the line break between Soapy and the waiter. Their exchange had been merged into one speaker. “The Cop and the Anthem”, p. 96
- 2024-11-02
DebutDébut in the title, as printed on the contents page. “The Brief Début of Tildy”, p. 253
Is O. Henry right for your group
Good for a group that rarely finishes the book?
The best in the catalogue for that. Members can read three stories on the morning of the meeting and still take part. Nobody has to have finished anything.
Every story has a twist. Doesn’t that get old?
Does it work for a middle or high school class?
Grades 8 and up handle it well with the glossary. Read the content notes first; a few stories carry period caricature you will want to discuss, not skip past.
Group packs · quoted on request
The Four Million for your book club or classroom
All 25 stories or a chosen dozen, with the slang glossary printed in. Printed, large print or digital. The quote depends on reader count, format and your dates.