The more than 600 stories written by O. Henry provided an embarrassment of riches for the compilers of this volume.  The final selection of the thirty-eight stories in this collection offers for the reader''s delight those tales honored almost unanimously by anthologists and those that represent, in variety and balance, the best work of America''s favorite storyteller.  They are tales in his most mellow, humorous, and ironic moods.  They give the full range and flavor of the man born William Sydney Porter but known throughout the world as O. Henry, one of the great masters of the short story.From the Hardcover edition.

“I’ve got the name for our publishing operation. We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let’s call it Random House.” So recounts Bennett Cerf in this wonderfully amusing memoir of the making of a great publishing house. An incomparable raconteur, possessed of an irrepressible wit and an abiding love of books and authors, Cerf brilliantly evokes the heady days of Random House’s first decades. Part of the vanguard of young New York publishers who revolutionized the book business in the 1920s and ’30s, Cerf helped usher in publishing’s golden age. Cerf was a true personality, whose other pursuits (columnist, anthologist, author, lecturer, radio host, collector of jokes and anecdotes, perennial judge of the Miss America pageant, and panelist on What’s My Line?) helped shape his reputation as a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm and brought unprecedented attention to his company and to his authors. At once a rare behind-the-scenes account of book publishing and a fascinating portrait of four decades’ worth of legendary authors, from James Joyce and William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Eudora Welty, At Random is a feast for bibliophiles and anyone who’s ever wondered what goes on inside a publishing house.

The more than 600 stories written by O. Henry provided an embarrassment of riches for the compilers of this volume.  The final selection of the thirty-eight stories in this collection offers for the reader''s delight those tales honored almost unanimously by anthologists and those that represent, in variety and balance, the best work of America''s favorite storyteller.  They are tales in his most mellow, humorous, and ironic moods.  They give the full range and flavor of the man born William Sydney Porter but known throughout the world as O. Henry, one of the great masters of the short story.From the Hardcover edition.

“I’ve got the name for our publishing operation. We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let’s call it Random House.” So recounts Bennett Cerf in this wonderfully amusing memoir of the making of a great publishing house. An incomparable raconteur, possessed of an irrepressible wit and an abiding love of books and authors, Cerf brilliantly evokes the heady days of Random House’s first decades. Part of the vanguard of young New York publishers who revolutionized the book business in the 1920s and ’30s, Cerf helped usher in publishing’s golden age. Cerf was a true personality, whose other pursuits (columnist, anthologist, author, lecturer, radio host, collector of jokes and anecdotes, perennial judge of the Miss America pageant, and panelist on What’s My Line?) helped shape his reputation as a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm and brought unprecedented attention to his company and to his authors. At once a rare behind-the-scenes account of book publishing and a fascinating portrait of four decades’ worth of legendary authors, from James Joyce and William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Eudora Welty, At Random is a feast for bibliophiles and anyone who’s ever wondered what goes on inside a publishing house.