Now Available: The Complete Western Stories of O. Henry

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I forget how many years ago it was. I’d been reading O. Henry’s Complete Works and musing, not for the first time, on how Henry is seldom included in discussions of early Western authors. Heart of the West comes up every now and then, but Henry wrote many more Western stories beyond the nineteen in that collection—some of the others being even better, in my opinion.

It would be great, I told my mom, if somebody got the idea to put together a collection of all O. Henry’s western stories. A volume with all of them in one place would be a great addition to any Western enthusiast’s library, and I’d bet many would be pleasantly surprised by some of those lesser-known stories that were scattered throughout Henry’s other anthologies—“Friends in San Rosario,” “The Roads We Take,” “Madam Bo-Peep, of the Ranches,” and so on. Everybody knows titles like “The Caballero’s Way” and “Hearts and Crosses,” but who’s heard of “Art and the Bronco” or “The Red Roses of Tonia?” If only one of those publishers who specialize in vintage public-domain reprints would have the idea—

It was about this point that Mom said, “Why don’t you do it?”

Publishing this collection has been a daydream of mine ever since then. It’s been something I dabbled with in spare moments and shoved to a back burner in busier times again and again: researching the publication dates of the stories, finding original magazine illustrations, cleaning up and formatting the text, and producing a cover. I had some grand aspirations at first, involving in-depth introductions and glossaries and such, but in the end I kept it simple with just a foreword and some appendices. The main point is that all of O. Henry’s Western stories—over forty of them—are collected in one volume; something that to my knowledge has never been done before. There’s also thirty illustrations from original magazine publications. And it’s now available on Kindle!