Q&A with Ben Yagoda

 

 

 

Ben Yagoda is the author of the new novel Alias O. Henry, which is based on the life of the writer O. Henry (1862-1910). Yagoda's many other books include O. Henry: 101 Stories. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

 

Q: As someone who has written about and studied O. Henry’s work, why did you decide to write a novel based on his life?

A: I started out with the idea of writing a biography of him, but in my initial research I discovered a biography from the 1950s, Alias O. Henry, by Gerald Langford, that was really good. Specifically, I didn’t feel that I could find out much more about O. Henry’s life than Langford had.

Meanwhile, I had started to read O. Henry short stories, and found I liked them, particularly the portrait they painted of New York City in the first decade of the 20th century.

The thought occurred to me to put the author—whose real name was William Sydney Porter—in that setting, use some of the facts of his life as tentpoles, try to work in variations on his actual stories, come up with answers for some of the questions that even Langford couldn’t answer, and see what came of it.

Along the way, I borrowed Langford’s title—I found I just couldn’t improve on it. 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the novel?

A: It took a while to find the right one. I did a lot of research—both because that’s what I’m used to and enjoy doing, and as a way to procrastinate sitting down and making up stuff!—and when I finally did start to write, my challenge was to streamline the information about New York in this fascinating time to Goldilocks proportion: not too much, not too little, just right.

I hope and feel that in the final product, the characters complement the setting and vice versa.

Q: The Library Journal review of the book says, “O. Henry enthusiasts will get the literary references; however, intimate knowledge of his works isn't necessary to appreciate Yagoda’s clever irony, which pays homage to the master of the short story without attempting to overshadow him.” What do you think of that description?

A: What’s not to like?! It’s true that quite a few of O.Henry’s short stories show up in the novel, including his most famous one, and it was fun to come up with plausible origin stories for them.

As that review says, you don’t have to know the stories to enjoy the novel. But I hope the book sends readers back to the source, and possibly to an anthology I edited for the Library of America, O. Henry, 101 Stories.

Q: What do you see as O. Henry’s legacy today?

A: In his prime, he was probably the most popular short story writer in the country, but he fell out of favor not long after his death in 1910. Stories that relied on plot, not to mention the twist endings he specialized in, came across as old-fashioned, as did the sentimentality he sometimes displayed.

He’s still assigned in middle school and high school English classes, but that’s limited to a handful of his stories, notably “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief.” But I hope the novel and the anthology will bring more readers to his work, which at its best is very sharp and often funny.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A book about irony. No joke.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I wish I could supply an O. Henry-esque twist at the end, but I think that about covers it.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb