PROSE FICTION When the vogue in local color was noted it was observed that the short story

had come to be the most acceptable vehicle for the expression of regionalism. There was at the same time a school of unlocalized art in short fiction, the most able representatives of which were Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Frank R. Stockton, H. C. Bunner, and Ambrose Bierce. Aldrich "Marjorie Daw" depended for its popularity not on the region it made known but on the sensation disclosed to its reader at the very end. The story itself was a mere anecdote, but it was told with whimsical humor and a "patrician elegance" of style. Stockton "The Lady or the Tiger?" though lacking the grace of "Marjorie Daw," went beyond it in making the impossible seem plausible, and prepared the way for the legerdemain of O. Henry. Bunner in "Short Sixes" was a fastidious craftsman who, in contrast to the more flamboyant local colorists, contributed to the short story a Gallic lightness of touch. Bierce recalled the manner of Poe in the collection which he finally entitled "In the Midst of Life," stories of a weird world, related with superb technique. The humor of Stockton, the surprise of Aldrich, the reportorial skill of Bunner, something of the harlequinism of Artemus Ward, and of the theatricality of Bret Harte were united in William Sydney Porter ( 1862-1910), known everywhere as O. Henry. Beginning as a drug clerk in North Carolina, he had drifted to Texas, from whence he fled to Honduras because of financial irregularities for which he later went to prison. He had begun writing in Texas; and during his imprisonment and after his release, contributed to the Sunday supplements of New York newspapers. He wrote stories with Southern and Western, and even Latin-American setting, but his best work was done as prose laureate of the metropolis. O. Henry was enormously prolific. It is not necessary, however, to read all of his two hundred and fifty stories to understand the peculiar technique which he employed. He is perhaps at his best in such stories as "The Furnished Room," "The Gift of the Magi," "A Municipal Report," "Mammon and the Archer," "A Lick-penny Lover," penny Lover," "An Unfinished Story," and "The Last Leaf."