The Four Million (Version 3) - Free Audiobook

The Four Million is a 1906 collection of short stories by O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter. It was his second book and the first devoted to New York City, where he had settled and was turning out stories at a steady pace for newspapers and magazines. The title is a pointed reply to the notion, popular at the time, that only "the Four Hundred" members of high society counted in the city. O. Henry's subject is everybody else: the roughly four million ordinary residents of the city.

The book contains twenty-five stories, among them "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Cop and the Anthem", two of the best known in American literature. Its characters are shop girls, clerks, waiters, tramps, struggling artists and young couples scraping by on small wages in rented rooms. Many stories turn on chance meetings, mistaken identities or small sacrifices, and O. Henry tells them in a chatty, playful voice full of slang and wordplay, usually building toward a twist in the final lines.

The collection helped fix O. Henry's reputation as a chronicler of city life and as a master of the surprise ending. It suits readers who like short, warm-hearted stories with humour and a sentimental streak, and anyone curious about everyday life in New York at the start of the twentieth century.