Perhaps no other American writer has gained and lost as much critical favor as quickly as O. Henry. Bruce Watson summed it up best in his 1997 Smithsonian article: ‘‘When he died in 1910, O. Henry was in the pantheon of American writers. These days critics regard him as a clever hack.’’ O. Henry received some of his strongest praise for his stories about New York, which include ‘‘Mammon and the Archer.’’ O. Henry published many of these stories under contract for the New York World, completing one story each week from 1903 to 1905. New Yorkers loved these stories, and O. Henry quickly became a legend in the city. O. Henry’s reputation increased even more in the eyes of both critics and popular readers in 1906 with the publication of The Four Million, which collected several of his New York stories, including ‘‘Mammon and the Archer.’’

O. Henry’s fame in 1906 extended well beyond New York. As Luther S. Luedtke and Keith Lawrence note in their entry on the author for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the collection ‘‘sold phenomenally well and made Porter’s pseudonym a household name across America.’’ Critics and biographers cite many reasons for the passionate interest in O. Henry’s short stories, but one factor stands out above the rest. In his 1916 biography of O. Henry, Alphonso Smith says, ‘‘Most of those who have commented upon O. Henry’s work have singled out his technique, especially his unexpected endings, as his distinctive contribution to the American short story.’’

In 1916, the same year as Smith’s biography, Katherine Fullerton Gerould, a noted short-story writer, became the first major critic to turn against O. Henry. Says Gerould in an infamous New York Times Magazine interview with Joyce Kilmer, ‘‘O. Henry did not write the short story. O. Henry wrote the expanded anecdote.’’ This attack was answered two months later by a Bookman critic who suggests that Gerould might change her opinion if she read several of O. Henry’s stories, including ‘‘Mammon and the Archer.’’

Despite the fierce defense of O. Henry by some critics, the attacks on O. Henry’s works continued to build force in the 1920s. As Eugene Current-Garcia notes in his 1982 entry on the author for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ‘‘critics such as F. L. Pattee and N. Bryllion Fagin denounced the superfi- ciality and falseness in his stories and his failure, as they saw it, to take himself and his art seriously.’’ And Luedtke and Lawrence note in their Dictionary of Literary Biography entry that ‘‘Critics of the 1920s satirized mercilessly the hundreds of wouldbe writers who emulated Porter’s formulaic plot constructions.’’ In 1943, this animosity reached a head, with the publication of the first edition of Understanding Fiction by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. In his 1974 entry on O. Henry for American Writers, Kent Bales notes that, in this book, O. Henry was ‘‘exhibited as a writer who did not understand fiction.’’ This attitude persisted throughout the twentieth century, and few critics since have praised O. Henry’s writings.

In addition, few critics have chosen to discuss O. Henry’s specific stories in detail, even stories like ‘‘Mammon and the Archer,’’ one of O. Henry’s most popular and most anthologized stories. In his entry on O. Henry for Twayne’s United States Authors Series Online, Current-Garcia calls Anthony Rockwall ‘‘the epitome of O. Henry’s type of the self-made American business tycoon; he knows that money talks, even in affairs of the heart.’’ However, Bales (writing in American Writers ) offers a different interpretation of the story, saying...