Postscripts — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Bad Man as Familiar Stranger

The excerpt titled “The ‘Bad Man’” exemplifies O. Henry’s method of puncturing regional stereotypes. A desperado with “long, curling hair” and a “buckskin coat” terrorizes a Texas town until a “little, wizened, consumptive-looking drummer” steps forward. The crowd expects violence; instead, the drummer collects an old debt. The bad man is unmasked as Zeke Skinner, a Connecticut farm boy selling fake liver medicine. The reversal is double: the outlaw is a fraud, and the hero is a creditor.

This sketch relies on precise details—the “double glass spectacles,” the “funny hopping kind of a run”—to make the mundane triumph credible. The humor comes from the gap between the theatrical threat and the prosaic resolution. O. Henry uses the setting not for local color but as a stage for a joke about appearances.

Book Reviews as Comic Pretexts

Several pieces in Postscripts are ostensibly book reviews, but the excerpts show O. Henry treating the reviewed work as a minor concern. In one, he speculates about a novel’s plot based on its title: “We would like to read ‘Mr. Pettigrew’s Bad Dog’ and find out whether the man was lucky enough to only marry the lady.” The review becomes a riff on marriage, not literature.

Another piece, “A Slight Mistake,” describes a man submitting spring verses with “a trifle illegible” handwriting. The focus is on the poet’s appearance and the editor’s reaction, not the poem itself. These reviews function as character sketches or satirical essays, using the book as a prop. The catalog subject “American fiction” is misleading; the excerpts are closer to humorous journalism.

Voice and Structure in the Early Sketches

The excerpts share a consistent narrative voice: conversational, wry, and fond of understatement. Sentences are short, with punchy endings: “Then the crowd scattered and the twelve policeman headed Zeke off at the next corner and clubbed him all the way to the station house.” The humor often depends on a sudden shift in register—from melodrama to mundane detail.

Structurally, many pieces follow a pattern: a setup that promises danger or romance, then a deflation. The “bad man” sketch builds tension with a crowd’s fear, then resolves with a debt collection. The book review pieces set up expectations about literary merit, then veer into everyday absurdity. This formula, while repetitive, shows O. Henry refining the twist ending that would define his later stories.

Readers should approach Postscripts as a workshop notebook rather than a polished collection. The pieces are uneven—some are mere filler, others contain the germ of a classic O. Henry story. Pay attention to the throwaway lines and the way he handles dialogue; the seeds of “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief” are here, still in comic soil. The introduction by Florence Stratton provides context, but the excerpts speak for themselves.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to an O. Henry sketch about a man adrift by a river, watching others drift too, and it struck me how stillness could carry so much. Later, shelving books, my hand landed on In Great Waters: Four Stories — Background and Themes, and I saw the same quiet currents there, waiting. It felt less like discovery, more like remembering.