O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesMar 2023

Rating 3.6
Word count
680K words
Chapters
68

Tags

Motivation and Growth Human NatureLight ReadingAward WinnersHumor ReliefShort StoriesBeautiful EssaysPopular NarrativeSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 by Blanche Colton WilliamsAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Mar 1, 2004

Editor's review

This collection of prize-winning short stories from the 1920 O. Henry Memorial Award gathers the English-language short fiction that caught the judges' attention that year, edited by Blanche Colton Williams. Its value lies not in rereading classics but in showing the aesthetic tastes of American short fiction after World War I: carefully worked endings, concrete character situations, and close observation of everyday life. For readers who want to understand the early years of the O. Henry Award or study the tradition of the American magazine short story, this is primary material that can be read directly. The e-book comes from Project Gutenberg, plainly formatted and without notes, suitable for extensive reading or reference. It is worth reading as a slice of its era, noting how the stories depict city life, class differences and emotional expression; not every piece will dazzle, but overall it conveys the shared character of short-story writing of the period.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Start with the editor's note or the table of contents, sample three or four stories on different subjects, then decide the order for reading the whole book.
  2. After each story, jot down in a sentence or two how the ending is handled, to compare the structures.
  3. Treat it as a collection for bedtime or the commute: one story at a time, without rushing.
  4. If using it for research, also look up the publication context of American short stories around 1920.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
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  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68

FAQ

Does this book collect O. Henry's own stories? No. This is the collection of winning short stories for the 1920 O. Henry Memorial Award. The award is named after O. Henry, but the book contains works by that year's winning authors, not by O. Henry himself.
Does the e-book have notes or a Chinese translation? Sources indicate this is the English e-book released by Project Gutenberg, mainly the original text, usually without detailed notes or a Chinese translation. Reading requires some English proficiency; use a dictionary when necessary.
Is it suitable for reading from cover to cover? You can read it straight through, but each story stands alone and doing so is not necessary. A more practical approach is to sample a few stories and read by interest; for research, read systematically by the table of contents and take notes.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Project Gutenberg Author

Project Gutenberg is not a single author but a nonprofit digital library founded by Michael Hart in 1971 and one of the world's earliest free ebook platforms. It relies on volunteers to digitize, proofread, and freely distribute public-domain works and is now operated by the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Its collection contains 2,692 works, mainly religious texts, epics, and story collections, including the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims volumes, the epic Mahabharata, a literal translation of the Arabian Nights, and Danish editions of the Old and New Testaments. Public information is limited, and its nature is closer to a public-interest compiling and dissemination body; these texts are open to the public, easy to consult and circulate, and have had a profound influence on the spread of ebooks and the preservation of public-domain resources.