Strictly Business, Vol. 1

Download or read book Strictly Business, Vol. 1 written by O. Henry and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-09 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Strictly Business, Vol. 1: More Stories of the Four Million There was once a Western artist, come to New York, who at first wrote home glowing letters about the various literary celebrities he was meeting, but there came a time when to a brother artist he ruefully remarked: "It's best to know these chaps only by their writings. Once you get acquainted with them, they're just like everybody else." With equal truth it may be said that no recollections of intimate friends ever give the insight into a departed author's real personality half so well as do his letters. Especially does this apply to a man of innate shyness who perpetually cloaked his personality with a gentle reserve that seldom was penetrated. Indeed, each time I read some new recollections of "an intimate friend of O. Henry, "I always picture his ghost sitting somewhere over a celestial highball - they must have highballs there or it wouldn't be Heaven for him - smiling sarcastically. For Sydney Porter, gentle, lovable, talented though he was, had no intimate friends. Stunned perhaps by the hard blows that life had dealt him, there was none to whom he revealed himself without reserve, to whom he confided his hopes, his ambitions, his estimate of himself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.