James Cummins Bookseller

[N.p., Ohio or New York: ca. 1898-1903].

Price: $25,000.00

About the item

Published in Ainslee’s Magazine, December 1903; collected in Whirligigs (1910). Pencil on paper, rectos only, signed in ink on the first page, with a few ink corrections, and occasional copy editing marks, including at head: “Rush”. 26 ff. on guards. 1 vols. 8-1/4 x 6-1/4 inches (21 x 15.5 cm). Full red morocco gilt, marbled endpapers, added title page in typescript. Manuscript pages with single closed stab hole from compositor’s spike, old fold, generally fine. Provenance: Frank Hogan (morocco ex-libris), his sale, Parke-Bernet 23-24 January 1945, lot 257.

Item #374831

“One who has been crossed in love should never breathe the odor of the ratama tree. It stirs the memory to a dangerous degree.”
A remarkable early O. Henry Christmas story, written while the author was serving time for embezzlement in the Ohio Penitentiary and was determined to “bury the name of Bill Porter in the depths of oblivion”. Porter (1862-1910), who had variously been bank teller, pharmacy clerk, and Texas newspaperman, was the prison dispensary clerk and lived in the prison hospital, and did much of his writing in the middle of the night after his medical duties were over. From “the raw heart of chill depression” (as fellow inmate Al Jennings put it), Porter wrote more than a dozen of his best-known stories during the three years of his reduced sentence, including his first Christmas story, “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking”, “A Medley of Moods”, and this tale of the life and times of the Frio Kid, who became a “bad man” after Miss Rosita McMullen spurned him to marry another. “A Chaparral Christmas Gift” opens with a Christmas wedding and gunfight and concludes with rather a darker twist than the sentimentality of “The Gift of the Magi”.
Porter used numerous pseudonyms, but it was with the name O. Henry that he was able to draw a curtain over his earlier identity. Ainslee’s Magazine began publishing O. Henry in 1901 and the next year its publisher advanced him money to get out of Pittsburgh and come to New York. Jennings named “A Chaparral Christmas Gift” as one of the stories composed in the penitentiary; this is the setting manuscript, possibly slightly rewritten for its publication in Ainslee’s for December 1903.
In Alias O. Henry, Langford notes that “early O. Henry stories attracted attention first as the authentic reporting of one who had lived among cowboys in Texas and among fugitives from justice in Central America” (138). “Several other Western characters in the O. Henry stories can instructively be compared with Texans of the 1870’s and 1880’s”, writes Langford, who identifies “A Chaparral Christmas Gift” as “a thinly disguised account of an episode in the notorious Sutton-Taylor feud” (213). The feud claimed some three dozen lives in DeWitt county between 1868 and 1876; the outlaw John Wesley Hardin was responsible for the deaths of two Sutton leaders.
A TEXAS CHRISTMAS STORY BY O. HENRY.