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The Ransom of Red Chief
In O. Henry's classic short story "The Ransom of Red Chief," Sam and Bill kidnap the son of a wealthy mortgage fancier named Johnny Dorset, who turns out to be a ten-year-old terror. Initially, Sam...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
“The Ransom of Red Chief” is a short story by O. Henry. It was first published in 1907. The short story deals with a kidnapping, which is not going as well as planned. Instead of making money by...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Regionalism in literature is work that focuses on the distinct characteristics of a particular geographic area. It is also called local color. In "The Ransom of Red Chief," the author uses the...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
“The Ransom of Red Chief” is a short story written by O. Henry. It was first published in 1910. In the story, two men, Bill and Sam, kidnap a young boy, Johnny. They do this in the hope to make...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
While Bill and the narrator are holding captive the only child of Ebenezer Dorset, the narrator notes that the boy "had Bill terrorized from the start." The word "terrorized" might seem, at the...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
In O'Henry's classic short story "The Ransom of Red Chief," Sam and Bill kidnap the son of a wealthy mortgage fancier in the town of Summit and hope to make a large sum of money for the boy's...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
What you are essentially asking for are examples of both direct characterization—when we are told, directly, what qualities a character possesses—and indirect characterization—when we must infer...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
I would say that the signature "Two desperate men" actually has two separate meanings. Remember, Bill and Sam have kidnapped Johnny in order to extract a ransom from the boy's father. Therefore,...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Initially, Sam and Bill plan on attaining two thousand dollars by holding a child ransom in order to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois. Sam and Bill end up kidnapping a...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
In "The Ransom of Red Chief," the irony of the situation and the verbal facility of the first-person narrator go some way toward disguising the true nature of the situation. The two kidnappers are...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
"The Ransom of Red Chief" is a story which is saturated with situational irony: in it, two criminals kidnap a young boy, only to find themselves terrorized and at the mercy of the one they...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Sam has trouble sleeping soundly the night after kidnapping the oldest son of Mr. Ebenezer Dorset of Summit. After the little boy, who has demanded to be called Red Chief, actually tries to scalp...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Shortly after Sam and Bill kidnap Johnny Dorset and take him to a cave in the mountains, they discover that Johnny is an energetic, violent young boy and soon realize that they've made a terrible...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Shortly after kidnapping the disgruntled, energetic Johnny Dorset, Sam and Bill discover that the boy enjoys being away from home and is going to be a handful. When Sam returns from the village,...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
The kidnappers, Sam and Bill, write a ransom letter to a wealthy mortgage financier in the town of Summit named Ebenezer Dorset and demand that he pay fifteen hundred dollars in large bills if he...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
The little boy at first fights vigorously against being kidnapped. He struggles, the narrator tells us, like a "welter-weight cinnamon bear." Once brought to the cave where they are hiding him,...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
O. Henry uses numerous allusions in his comic story “The Ransom of Red Chief.” The reference to King Herod evokes the idea of infanticide, the killing of children. King Herod was the king of Judea...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Sam and Bill have just dropped off little Johnny Dorset at his house. But, far from being pleased at returning home, Johnny's actually quite devastated. The spoiled brat has been having so much fun...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Sam is the narrator of the story and one of the con-men who kidnaps Ebenezeer Dorset's ten-year-old son, Johnny. Shortly after kidnapping the boy, Sam heads into town and leaves Bill to watch the...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
The name Johnny Dorset does not occur in the story until the end. The kidnappers decide to kidnap a child of a prominent citizen for the purpose of getting money. They chose the only child of...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
In O. Henry's story "The Ransom of Red Chief," the kidnapped boy is having the time of his life. He has never camped out before, so he enjoys the hideout that Sam and Bill have up on the mountain....
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Bill Driscoll is one of two kidnappers who take a young boy named Johnny Dorset for ransom. Ironically, however, the boy winds up taking control of the situation because he terrifies one kidnapper,...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Regionalism refers to a style of writing in which the narrative of the story is written so as to "concentrate on the landscape, dialect, customs, and folklore specific to a geographic region or...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Red Chief, as Johnny Dorset likes to call himself, is the freckle-faced ten-year-old son of Ebenezer Dorset, one of the wealthiest men in Summit, Alabama. Red Chief is an apt nickname because he...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Sam, the narrator of the story, seems to be the brains of the pair. He's the one who arranges to be the person who goes into town to determine the reaction to the kidnapping of the boy and who...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
The biblical allusions that O. Henry employs in "The Ransom of Red Chief" do reinforce the overall irony of the story's plot—a child getting the better of his kidnappers—but also feature delightful...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
In O. Henry's short story, "The Ransom of Red Chief," two men named Bill and Sam kidnap a little boy from his father, Ebenezer Dorset. Bill and Sam, together, had about six hundred dollars, but...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
The father's response surprises the kidnappers because they expect him to love his child and want him back. In fact, the kidnappers rely on this for their scheme to earn money:...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
The entire story is told by Sam, so the account is in the first-person and from Sam's point of view. O. Henry needed to establish that such a character was capable of writing what is actually a...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Johnny Dorset, the son of wealthy banker Ebenezer Dorset, immediately attacks them; later, he terrorizes his captors even more. When Sam and Bill ride up in a buggy and call to the boy, he throws a...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Sam and Bill concoct a surprisingly credible and grammatically correct ransom letter. Ordinarily this would be effective, because it would show the father than he was dealing with intelligent men...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
One allusion in "The Ransom of Red Chief" is contained in the following dialogue between Bill and Sam: 'Sam, do you know who my favourite Biblical character is?' 'Take it easy,' says I. 'You'll...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Mostly, these games are based on pretending to be Indians, trappers, cowboys, and so on. Johnny inevitably plays the main role and Bill usually plays the role that takes the most abuse. Johnny...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
The little boy named Johnny Dorset, who calls himself Red Chief, is delighted with being kidnapped because it lets him escape from the discipline and chores of home, if any; because it gets him out...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Most aspects of the story are not what you would expect upon first reading of the text. Consider: The story is set in and around the town of Summit - a term that would usually be applied to the...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Retell the story as a poem! If you follow the plot of the story and just put it into poetry, you will have the rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, etc. I'll get you started - I am...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
In this humorous story, Sam and Bill are two inept criminals who kidnap ten-year-old Johnny, the son of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. In a ransom letter to Johnny's father, Sam and...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
In this entertaining little story, the kidnappers, Bill and the narrator, have taken the son of Ebenezer Dorset, who is an important person in Summit, Alabama, counting on his being willing to pay...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Bill and Sam choose Summit, Alabama as a location for the kidnapping because, within the time frame of this story, the Appalachian area in northern Alabama is remote and sparsely populated. Sam...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Bill asks Sam to reduce the ransom amount because he believes that it would be cruel to expect a father to pay so much for his ill-behaved child's return. It is also likely (based on his...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Nothing about the plan Sam and Bill hatch goes as expected in "The Ransom of Red Chief" by O. Henry. They picked a rather sleepy little town where nothing really happens, and they targeted the...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
The tone of The Ransom of Red Chief is humorous. Authors use different types of humor in literature including, but not limited to: hyperbole, dialect, and understatement. Hyperbole is using obvious...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Sam is one of the two kidnappers in the O. Henry short story, "The Ransom of Red Chief." Sam and his partner, Bill, decide to abduct the son of a wealthy Summit, Alabama man, Ebenezer Dorset. But...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Anyone who has ever been around a mischievous or hard-to-discipline child can appreciate the irony in this story. The two bumbling kidnappers, Bill Driscoll and the narrator, are going to try to...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
O. Henry's hilarious story of the misadventures of two con men whose supposed fail-proof plan to kidnap the child of the richest man in the small town of Summit, Alabama, backfires upon them when...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
"The Ransom of Red Chief," a short story by O. Henry, is a classic because of its brilliant irony. The focus of the story, an image or concept that the reader keeps in mind while reading and that...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Bill and Sam are con men. Sam, the narrator, says: Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
O. Henry's witty short story that contains one comic reversal after another, foreshadows the ironic outcome with the opening sentence of Sam, the narrator, “It looked like a good thing: but wait...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
As the title suggests, the main character of O. Henry's ironic story is the only son of Ebenezer Dorset, the boy who calls himself "Red Chief, the terror of the plains." And, he is, indeed, a...
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The Ransom of Red Chief
Sam and Bill are like a typical comical couple who play off of each other because they are opposites in intellect, yet similar in stupidity. Some of the first adjectives that would describe these...