　　O. Henry (1862-1910), Born William Sydney Porter, on September 11,1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina, he was the famous American short-story writer, who wrote under the pseudonym O. Henry,pioneered in picturing the lives of lower-class and middle-class New Yorkers.
　　Porter attended school for a short time, then clerked in an uncle's drugstore. At the age of 20 he went to Texas, working first on a ranch and later as a bank teller. In 1887 he married and began to write freelance sketches. A few years later he founded a humorous weekly, the Rolling Stone . When this failed, he became a reporter and columnist on the Houston Post .
　　He was indicted in 1896 for embezzling bank funds(actually a result of technical mismanagement),and was imprisoned in Columbus, Ohio. During his three-year incarceration, he wrote adventure stories set in Texas and Central America that quickly became popular and were collected in Cabbages and Kings .Released from prison in 1902, Porter went to New York City, his home and the setting of most of his fiction for the remainder of his life, writing prodigiously under the pen name O. Henry. His popular collections of stories included The Four Million; Heart of the West and The Trimmed Lamp; The Gentle Grafter and The Voice of the City; Options; and Whirligigs and Strictly Business.
　　欧·亨利，20世纪初美国著名短篇小说家，美国现代短篇小说创始人。与法国的莫泊桑、俄国的契诃夫并称为“世界三大短篇小说巨匠”。他少年时曾一心想当画家，婚后在妻子的鼓励下开始写作。后因在银行供职时的账目问题而入狱，服刑期间开始认真写作，并以“欧·亨利”为笔名发表了大量短篇小说，引起读者广泛关注。
　　欧·亨利是一位高产的作家，一生共留下了一部长篇小说和三百多篇短篇小说。他的短篇小说构思精巧，风格独特，与当时其他作家着重表现纽约等大城市的上层社会不同，欧·亨利一直着力于表现繁华都会以及西部乡村里普普通通的“小人物”，描写了美国民众的日常生活以及他们对浪漫和冒险生活的追求。其以语言幽默、结局出人意料（即“欧·亨利式结尾”）而闻名于世。代表作有短篇小说《爱的牺牲》(A Service of Love)、《警察与赞美诗》(The Cop and the Anthem)、《带家具出租的房间》(The Furnished Room)、《麦琪的礼物》(The Gift of the Magi)、《最后的常春藤叶》（The Last Leaf）等。
　　本书为英文原版，汇集了65篇欧·亨利经典作品，同时配以原版朗读供读者免费下载，让读者边听边读，更好地提升英语水平。

作者简介

　　欧·亨利，20世纪初美国著名短篇小说家，美国现代短篇小说创始人。与法国的莫泊桑、俄国的契诃夫并称为“世界三大短篇小说巨匠”。本书按英文版方式出版，汇集了65篇欧·亨利的经典短篇小说，同时配以原版朗读文件，供读者免费下载，边听边读，综合提升语言的学习能力与水平。

内页插图

01 An Adjustment of Nature
02 The Admiral
03 After 20 Years
04 Between Rounds
05 The Brief Début of Tildy
06 The Buyer From Cactus City
07 By Courier
08 The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock
09 A Call Loan
10 Caught
11 The Chair of Philanthromathematics
12 A Chaparral Christmas Gift
13 A Comedy in Rubber
14 The Coming-out of Maggie
15 Conscience in Art
16 The Cop and the Anthem
17 A Cosmopolite in a Café
18 Cupid’s Exile Number Two
19 Dickey
20 The Exact Science of Matrimony
21 The Flag Paramount
22 “Fox-in-the-Morning”
23 From the Cabby’s Seat
24 The Furnished Room
25 The Gift of the Magi
26 The Green Door
27 The Hand that Riles the World
28 Hearts and Hands
29 Hygeia at the Solito
30 Innocents of Broadway
31 Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet
32 The Last Leaf
33 A Lickpenny Lover
34 Lost on Dress Parade
35 The Love-philter of Ikey Schoenstein
36 The Making of a New Yorker
37 Mammon and the Archer
38 Man About Town
39 Memoirs of a Yellow Dog
40 A Midsummer Masquerade
41 The Missing Chord
42 Modern Rural Sports
43 The Octopus Marooned
44 The Pimienta Pancakes
45 The Princess and the Puma
46 The Proem By the Carpenter
47 The Ransom of Mack
48 The Romance of a Busy Broker
49 Rouge et Noir
50 A Service of Love
51 Shearing the Wolf
52 Ships
53 Shoes
54 Sisters of the Golden Circle
55 The Skylight Room
56 Smith
57 Springtime à La Carte
58 Squaring the Circle
59 A Strange Story
60 Telemachus, Friend
61 Tobin’s Palm
62 An Unfinished Story
63 The Vitagraphoscope
64 The Voice of The City
65 Witches’ Loaves

精彩书摘

　　An Adjustment of Nature
　　In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had been sold for $5,000. The painter was a young scrub out of the West named Kraft, who had a favourite food and a pet theory. His pabulum was an unquenchable belief in the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature. His theory was fixed around corned-beef hash with poached egg. There was a story behind the picture, so I went home and let it drip out of a fountain-pen. The idea of Kraft—but that is not the beginning of the story.
　　Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took our meals at Cypher’s, on Eighth Avenue. I say “took.” When we had money, Cypher got it “off of ” us, as he expressed it. We had no credit; we went in, called for food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had confidence in Cypher’s sullenness and smouldering ferocity. Deep down in his sunless soul he was either a prince, a fool or an artist. He sat at a worm-eaten desk, covered with files of waiters’ checks so old that I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that Hendrik Hudson had eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power, in common with Napoleon III. and the goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a film over his eyes, rendering opaque the windows of his soul. Once when we left him unpaid, with egregious excuses, I looked back and saw him shaking with inaudible laughter behind his film. Now and then we paid up back scores.
　　But the chief thing at Cypher’s was Milly. Milly was a waitress. She was a grand example of Kraft’s theory of the artistic adjustment of nature. She belonged, largely, to waiting, as Minerva did to the art of scrapping, or Venus to the science of serious flirtation. Pedestalled and in bronze she might have stood with the noblest of her heroic sisters as “Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World.”
　　She belonged to Cypher’s. You expected to see her colossal figure loom through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you expect the Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog. There amid the steam of vegetables and the vapours of acres of “ham and,” the crash of crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of “short orders,” the cries of the hungering and all the horrid tumult of feeding man, surrounded by swarms of the buzzing winged beasts bequeathed us by Pharaoh, Milly steered her magnificent way like some great liner cleaving among the canoes of howling savages.
　　Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they could be followed only with awe. Her sleeves were always rolled above her elbows. She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands and dropped us out of the window. She had seen fewer years than any of us, but she was of such superb Evehood and simplicity that she mothered us from the beginning. Cypher’s store of eatables she poured out upon us with royal indifference to price and quantity, as from a cornucopia that knew no exhaustion. Her voice rang like a great silver bell; her smile was many-toothed and frequent; she seemed like a yellow sunrise on mountain tops. I never saw her but I thought of the Yosemite. And yet, somehow, I could never think of her as existing outside of Cypher’s. There nature had placed her, and she had taken root and grown mightily. She seemed happy, and took her few poor dollars on Saturday nights with the flushed pleasure of a child that receives an unexpected donation.
　　It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art at which we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing between a Haydn symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite congruity between Milly and Cypher’s.
　　“There is a certain fate hanging over Milly,” said Kraft, “and if it overtakes her she is lost to Cypher’s and to us.”
　　“She will grow fat?” asked Judkins, fearsomely.
　　“She will go to night school and become refined?” I ventured anxiously.
　　“It is this,” said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee with a stiff forefinger. “Caesar had his Brutus—the cotton has its bollworm, the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has his poison ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan, the rose has its—”
　　“Speak,” I interrupted, much perturbed. “You do not think that Milly will begin to lace?”
　　“One day,” concluded Kraft, solemnly, “there will come to Cypher’s for a plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and he will marry Milly.”
　　“Never!” exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.
　　“A lumberman,” repeated Kraft, hoarsely.
　　“And a millionaire lumberman!” I sighed, despairingly.
　　“From Wisconsin!” groaned Judkins.
　　We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few things were less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch THE VOICE OF THE CITY: BEST SHORT STORIES OF O. Henry [欧·亨利经典短篇小说] 下载 mobi epub pdf txt 电子书格式