Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1917 — O. HEART’S METHOD OF WORK [ARTICLE]

O. HEART’S METHOD OF WORK

Writer Gathered Little Material for the Remarkably Interesting Stories He Turned Out. O. Henry in his real work could write only by the light within. There was no elaborate scheme of preparation to take the place of the inspired word. He read nothing, or next to it. He investigated nothing. . He saw nobody. He had no propaganda, no views to exto teaqh. His was not the dull industry that investigates, notebook in hand, the slum, the factory and the markef place, and turns the mass of accumulated fact into the vast contemporary novel that pours Its slow current of alluvial mud through the channel of a thousand pages. —— Ignorant—undoubtedly, except of life itself —gloriously ignorant' he was. No college, not even a theological school. cOuld have matriculated him. Even of New York, so they now tell us, he knew practically nothing. But of little threads and patches, a vision of a haggard face seen Tor a moment In a crowd, a fallen word, the chance glance of an eye—of such as this interwoven with the cross thread of his marvelous imagination, he did his matchless work Let it so rest as his best monument. The little peckings of the critics about the base will but serve to keep dean the stone.—Stephen Leacock, in New Republic.