O. Henry at the Wikipedia: click here
The Cop and the Anthem at the wikipedia: click here
The Cop and the Anthem: review
Some academic activities (with solutions): click here
The Cop and the Anthem: audiobook
The Cop and the Anthem: short movie
Oliver Henry,
usually written O. Henry, was the pseudonym of William Sidney Porter. He
started to use different pseudonyms when wanted to publish his stories while he
was in prison. And as he liked O. Henry
the best, he kept using it ever after, and we always speak of him as O. Henry.
He was born in
1862, so in the middle of the American Civil War or Secession War, between the slavers confederates secessionists and the yankees abolitionists unionists. His birthday was on the 11th of September, so we have to suppose that
if he had known what were to happen, he would have written a story about it,
because he liked the surprising ironies of life.
He was born in
North Carolina, but he went to live in Texas where he graduated as a chemist
(or pharmacist, as he was American, not British). He was then 19 years old.
When he was 25,
he eloped with his girlfriend. They married and they had two children, a boy who
died soon after his birth, and, later, a girl, Margaret.
When he was 29, he started to work in a bank, and only 3 years later he was accused of misappropriation.
In order to avoid the trial and being found guilty, he run away to Honduras.
There he started a friendship with a famous train robber. Also, there he coined
the expression “banana republic” that appeared in his book Cabbages and Kings.
But when he knew
his wife coudn't come to Honduras (as they had planned) because she was dying of tuberculosis, he went back to the USA. He had spent six
months in Honduras. Back in the USA, he was found guilty of misappropriation and got
a penalty of 5 years in prison, but he went out after 3 years because of his good
behaviour.
Then he moved to
New York, the setting of most of his stories.
He died when he
was only 48 years old of cirrhosis: as you can imagine, he was a heavy drinker.
While he lived
in New York, he was a very prolific author because he wrote a story every week
for different magazines. He was a popular author; his stories are witty,
funny and with a surprising ending, but he wasn’t very praised by critics,
because they thought he wasn’t deep enough.
His most known short stories are The Gift of the Magi (where a very poor marriage try to buy presents each other in secret), The Ransom of Great Chief (where two bandits kidnap a boy, and the things doesn’t go as easily as they thought), The Last Leaf (where and old artist helps, in a very special way, to spirit another young artist who doesn’t want to fight for her own life), Hearts and Hands (where a prisoner and his guard travel by train and there they find an old acquaintance), etc.
The Cop and the
Anthem
It was published
in December 1904, and it’s a typical Henrian story. It has irony, witty sentences and an
unexpected ending. Furthermore, it was adapted for the cinema (as a part
of a longer movie) with Charles Laughton and Marilyn Monroe as stars.
It’s about a
lazy homeless who feels winter is coming, and knows he’s going to be cold, and, as
he lives in the streets, he has to look for warm accommodation. According to
his opinion, the best he can get is some months in prison: there he will be fed
and will have bed and blankets and a cell with a roof on it and walls around. But
the question is how can be he put into prison? So he tries different ways, that
is, different minor crimes, and waits for an officer to arrest him. But all of
his attempts are a failure, so at the end he decides..., but I’m not going to
be a spoiler telling you the end!
In the story The Last Leaf, there is a
personification: Pneumonia is treated
like a person who walks around, touches people and kills them. What personification
do we have in our story? Explain its elements.
Our protagonist, what
cannot he do to get warm in winter that other (richer) people do?
What was Blackwell’s
Island, or, simply, the Island?
What’s the Boreas in
our story? What about the bluecoats?
How did Soapy protect
himself from the cold the previous night?
Why doesn’t he like
to go to a charity institution?
Explain the different ways to get arrested, and so an accommodation on the Island:
The expensive restaurant way
The breaking of a shop-window glass way
The regular restaurant way
The annoying a young woman way
The disorderly behaviour way
The umbrella way
