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Squaring the Circle
Файл электронной книги подготовлен в Агентстве ФТМ, Лтд., 2013
Paperback
First published January 1, 1923
17 people want to read
About the author
O. Henry
2,919 books1,891 followersSuch volumes as
Cabbages and Kings
(1904) and
The Four Million
(1906) collect short stories, noted for their often surprising endings, of American writer William Sydney Porter, who used the pen name O. Henry.
His biography shows where he found inspiration for his characters. His era produced their voices and his language.
Mother of three-year-old Porter died from tuberculosis. He left school at fifteen years of age and worked for five years in drugstore of his uncle and then for two years at a Texas sheep ranch.
In 1884, he went to Austin, where he worked in a real estate office and a church choir and spent four years as a draftsman in the general land office. His wife and firstborn died, but daughter Margaret survived him.
He failed to establish a small humorous weekly and afterward worked in poorly-run bank. When its accounts balanced not, people blamed and fired him.
In Houston, he worked for a few years until, ordered to stand trial for embezzlement, he fled to New Orleans and thence Honduras.
Two years later, he returned on account of illness of his wife. Apprehended, Porter served a few months more than three years in a penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. During his incarceration, he composed ten short stories, including A Blackjack Bargainer , The Enchanted Kiss , and The Duplicity of Hargraves .
In 1899, McClure's published Whistling Dick's Christmas Story and Georgia's Ruling .
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he sent manuscripts to New York editors. In the spring of 1902, Ainslee's Magazine offered him a regular income if he moved to New York.
In less than eight years, he became a bestselling author of collections of short stories. Cabbages and Kings came first in 1904 The Four Million, and The Trimmed Lamp and Heart of the West followed in 1907, and The Voice of the City in 1908, Roads of Destiny and Options in 1909, Strictly Business and Whirligigs in 1910 followed.
Posthumously published collections include The Gentle Grafter about the swindler, Jeff Peters; Rolling Stones , Waifs and Strays , and in 1936, unsigned stories, followed.
People rewarded other persons financially more. A Retrieved Reformation about the safe-cracker Jimmy Valentine got $250; six years later, $500 for dramatic rights, which gave over $100,000 royalties for playwright Paul Armstrong. Many stories have been made into films.
His biography shows where he found inspiration for his characters. His era produced their voices and his language.
Mother of three-year-old Porter died from tuberculosis. He left school at fifteen years of age and worked for five years in drugstore of his uncle and then for two years at a Texas sheep ranch.
In 1884, he went to Austin, where he worked in a real estate office and a church choir and spent four years as a draftsman in the general land office. His wife and firstborn died, but daughter Margaret survived him.
He failed to establish a small humorous weekly and afterward worked in poorly-run bank. When its accounts balanced not, people blamed and fired him.
In Houston, he worked for a few years until, ordered to stand trial for embezzlement, he fled to New Orleans and thence Honduras.
Two years later, he returned on account of illness of his wife. Apprehended, Porter served a few months more than three years in a penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. During his incarceration, he composed ten short stories, including A Blackjack Bargainer , The Enchanted Kiss , and The Duplicity of Hargraves .
In 1899, McClure's published Whistling Dick's Christmas Story and Georgia's Ruling .
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he sent manuscripts to New York editors. In the spring of 1902, Ainslee's Magazine offered him a regular income if he moved to New York.
In less than eight years, he became a bestselling author of collections of short stories. Cabbages and Kings came first in 1904 The Four Million, and The Trimmed Lamp and Heart of the West followed in 1907, and The Voice of the City in 1908, Roads of Destiny and Options in 1909, Strictly Business and Whirligigs in 1910 followed.
Posthumously published collections include The Gentle Grafter about the swindler, Jeff Peters; Rolling Stones , Waifs and Strays , and in 1936, unsigned stories, followed.
People rewarded other persons financially more. A Retrieved Reformation about the safe-cracker Jimmy Valentine got $250; six years later, $500 for dramatic rights, which gave over $100,000 royalties for playwright Paul Armstrong. Many stories have been made into films.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 2, 2023
O. Henry's "Squaring the Circle" is a short story that brings geometry into the understanding of the differences between a city and a country state of mind.
Story in short-The last of two feuding families make their final stand in the city.
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13123
AT THE HAZARD of wearying you this tale of vehement emotions must be prefaced by a discourse on geometry. Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines. The natural is rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect circles; the city man’s feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13126
floors, carry him ever away from himself. The round eyes of childhood typify innocence; the narrowed line of the flirt’s optic proves the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature’s most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss? Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the “round” of drinks. On the other hand, straight lines show that Nature has been deflected. Imagine Venus’s girdle transformed into a “straight front”! When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The result is often a rather curious product — for instance: A
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13134
prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower au gratin, and a New Yorker. Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical, not moral. The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of all its ways — even of its recreation and sports — coldly exhibit a sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13138
Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demonstrated the problem of squaring the circle. And it may be added that this mathematical introduction precedes an account of the fate of a Kentucky feud that was imported to the city that has a habit of making its importations conform to its angles. The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains between the Folwell and the Harkness families. The first victim of the homespun vendetta was a ‘possum dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness family
❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌spoiler alert
When they finally met in the city their equilibrium disrupted because the unnatural they both become friends.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13141
evened up this dire loss by laying out the chief of the Folwell clan. The Folwells were prompt at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles and made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog to a land where the ‘possums come down when treed without the stroke of an ax. The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses were shot at the plough, through their lamp-lit cabin windows, coming from camp-meeting, asleep, in duello, sober and otherwise, singly and in family groups, prepared and unprepared. Folwells had the branches of their family tree lopped off in similar ways, as the traditions of their country prescribed and authorized. By and by the pruning left but a single member of each family. And then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the controversy would give a too decided personal flavour to the feud, suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands, baulking the avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate opposing Folwell.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13149
A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary, unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he mixed with lard and shined his boots with the compound. He put on his store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and packed a carpet-sack with Spartan lingerie. He took his squirrel rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However ethical and plausible the habit
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13152
might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt’s revolver that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance. This and a hunting- knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the carpet-sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at the little cluster of
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13156
white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that marked the Folwell burying-ground. Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable, pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the great city waiting in the dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould him to the form of its millions of re-shaped victims. A cabby picked him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a bed of wind-tossed
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13159
tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack. On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an inch below his coat collar. He knew this much — that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon somewhere in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had come to kill
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13163
him. And as he stepped upon the sidewalk the red came into his eye and the feud-hate into his heart. The clamor of the central avenues drew him thitherward. He had half expected to see Cal coming down the street in his shirt- sleeves, with a jug and a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him in Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by and Cal did not appear. Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13167
About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse and suddenly squeezed him with its straight lines. Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular arteries of the city cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane. All life moved on tracks, in grooves, according to system, within boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube root; the measure of existence was square measure. People streamed by in straight rows; the
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13170
horrible din and crash stupefied him. Sam leaned against the sharp corner of a stone building. Those faces passed him by thousands, and none of them were turned toward him. A sudden foolish fear that he had died and was a spirit, and that they could not see him, seized him. And then the city smote him with loneliness. A fat man dropped out of the stream and stood a few feet distant, waiting for his car. Sam crept to his side and shouted above the tumult into his ear:
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13174
“The Rankinses’ hogs weighed more’n ourn a whole passel, but the mast in thar neighborhood was a fine chance better than what it was down—” The fat man moved away unostentatiously, and bought roasted chestnuts to cover his alarm. Sam felt the need of a drop of mountain dew. Across the street men passed in and out through swinging doors. Brief glimpses could be had of a glistening bar and its bedeckings. The feudist crossed and essayed to enter. Again had Art
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13178
eliminated the familiar circle. Sam’s hand found no door-knob — it slid, in vain, over a rectangular brass plate and polished oak with nothing even so large as a pin’s head upon which his fingers might close. Abashed,
reddened, heartbroken, he walked away from the bootless door and sat upon a step. A locust club tickled him in the ribs. “Take a walk for yourself,” said the policeman. “You’ve been loafing around here long enough.” At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam’s ear. He wheeled
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13182
around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts heaped on a steaming machine. He started across the street. An immense engine, running without mules, with the voice of a bull and the smell of a smoky lamp, whizzed past, grazing his knee. A cab-driver bumped him with a hub and explained to him that kind words were invented to be used on other occasions. A motorman clanged his bell wildly and, for once in his life, corroborated a cab-driver. A large lady in a changeable silk waist dug an
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13186
elbow into his back, and a newsy pensively pelted him with banana rinds, murmuring, “I hates to do it — but if anybody seen me let it pass!” Cal Harkness, his day’s work over and his express wagon stabled, turned the sharp edge of the building that, by the cheek of architects, is modelled upon a safety razor. Out of the mass of hurrying people his eye picked up, three yards away, the surviving bloody and implacable foe of his kith and kin.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13189
He stopped short and wavered for a moment, being unarmed and sharply surprised. But the keen mountaineer’s eye of Sam Folwell had picked him out. There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream of passers-by and the sound of Sam’s voice crying: “Howdy, Cal! I’m durned glad to see ye.” And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street the Cumberland feudists shook hands.
Story in short-The last of two feuding families make their final stand in the city.
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13123
AT THE HAZARD of wearying you this tale of vehement emotions must be prefaced by a discourse on geometry. Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines. The natural is rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect circles; the city man’s feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13126
floors, carry him ever away from himself. The round eyes of childhood typify innocence; the narrowed line of the flirt’s optic proves the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature’s most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss? Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the “round” of drinks. On the other hand, straight lines show that Nature has been deflected. Imagine Venus’s girdle transformed into a “straight front”! When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The result is often a rather curious product — for instance: A
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13134
prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower au gratin, and a New Yorker. Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical, not moral. The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of all its ways — even of its recreation and sports — coldly exhibit a sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13138
Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demonstrated the problem of squaring the circle. And it may be added that this mathematical introduction precedes an account of the fate of a Kentucky feud that was imported to the city that has a habit of making its importations conform to its angles. The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains between the Folwell and the Harkness families. The first victim of the homespun vendetta was a ‘possum dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness family
❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌spoiler alert
When they finally met in the city their equilibrium disrupted because the unnatural they both become friends.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13141
evened up this dire loss by laying out the chief of the Folwell clan. The Folwells were prompt at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles and made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog to a land where the ‘possums come down when treed without the stroke of an ax. The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses were shot at the plough, through their lamp-lit cabin windows, coming from camp-meeting, asleep, in duello, sober and otherwise, singly and in family groups, prepared and unprepared. Folwells had the branches of their family tree lopped off in similar ways, as the traditions of their country prescribed and authorized. By and by the pruning left but a single member of each family. And then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the controversy would give a too decided personal flavour to the feud, suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands, baulking the avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate opposing Folwell.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13149
A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary, unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he mixed with lard and shined his boots with the compound. He put on his store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and packed a carpet-sack with Spartan lingerie. He took his squirrel rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However ethical and plausible the habit
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13152
might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt’s revolver that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance. This and a hunting- knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the carpet-sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at the little cluster of
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13156
white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that marked the Folwell burying-ground. Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable, pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the great city waiting in the dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould him to the form of its millions of re-shaped victims. A cabby picked him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a bed of wind-tossed
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13159
tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack. On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an inch below his coat collar. He knew this much — that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon somewhere in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had come to kill
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13163
him. And as he stepped upon the sidewalk the red came into his eye and the feud-hate into his heart. The clamor of the central avenues drew him thitherward. He had half expected to see Cal coming down the street in his shirt- sleeves, with a jug and a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him in Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by and Cal did not appear. Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13167
About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse and suddenly squeezed him with its straight lines. Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular arteries of the city cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane. All life moved on tracks, in grooves, according to system, within boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube root; the measure of existence was square measure. People streamed by in straight rows; the
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13170
horrible din and crash stupefied him. Sam leaned against the sharp corner of a stone building. Those faces passed him by thousands, and none of them were turned toward him. A sudden foolish fear that he had died and was a spirit, and that they could not see him, seized him. And then the city smote him with loneliness. A fat man dropped out of the stream and stood a few feet distant, waiting for his car. Sam crept to his side and shouted above the tumult into his ear:
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13174
“The Rankinses’ hogs weighed more’n ourn a whole passel, but the mast in thar neighborhood was a fine chance better than what it was down—” The fat man moved away unostentatiously, and bought roasted chestnuts to cover his alarm. Sam felt the need of a drop of mountain dew. Across the street men passed in and out through swinging doors. Brief glimpses could be had of a glistening bar and its bedeckings. The feudist crossed and essayed to enter. Again had Art
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13178
eliminated the familiar circle. Sam’s hand found no door-knob — it slid, in vain, over a rectangular brass plate and polished oak with nothing even so large as a pin’s head upon which his fingers might close. Abashed,
reddened, heartbroken, he walked away from the bootless door and sat upon a step. A locust club tickled him in the ribs. “Take a walk for yourself,” said the policeman. “You’ve been loafing around here long enough.” At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam’s ear. He wheeled
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13182
around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts heaped on a steaming machine. He started across the street. An immense engine, running without mules, with the voice of a bull and the smell of a smoky lamp, whizzed past, grazing his knee. A cab-driver bumped him with a hub and explained to him that kind words were invented to be used on other occasions. A motorman clanged his bell wildly and, for once in his life, corroborated a cab-driver. A large lady in a changeable silk waist dug an
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13186
elbow into his back, and a newsy pensively pelted him with banana rinds, murmuring, “I hates to do it — but if anybody seen me let it pass!” Cal Harkness, his day’s work over and his express wagon stabled, turned the sharp edge of the building that, by the cheek of architects, is modelled upon a safety razor. Out of the mass of hurrying people his eye picked up, three yards away, the surviving bloody and implacable foe of his kith and kin.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 13189
He stopped short and wavered for a moment, being unarmed and sharply surprised. But the keen mountaineer’s eye of Sam Folwell had picked him out. There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream of passers-by and the sound of Sam’s voice crying: “Howdy, Cal! I’m durned glad to see ye.” And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street the Cumberland feudists shook hands.
April 28, 2024
Fun story, although I did see the ending coming. The last survivor of one family that had been part of a lethal feud finds out the last surviving member of the other family has moved to the big city, so he goes on a mission to execute this final nemesis. He quickly finds himself out of his depth.
February 18, 2025
Is architecture always of a brutalist style, consisting of sharp angles instead of nature's swirls of circles? And can people overcome the edginess? Well, of course! A very good short by this author.
July 30, 2015
Утро, начавшееся со слов: «я уже сыт всем этим дерьмом» не сулит ничего хорошего. Как думаете? «Когда мы начинаем двигаться по прямой линии и огибать острые углы, наша натура терпит изменения. В результате нередко получается весьма курьезное явление, например: голубая роза, древесный спирт, штат Миссури, голосующий за республиканцев, цветная капуста в сухарях и житель Нью-Йорка. Природные свойства быстрее всего утрачиваются в большом городе». «Ноги горожанина, приученные к прямоугольным комнатам и площадям, уводят его по прямой линии прочь от него самого». Привет вам, жители Нью Йорка!
Мне прежде не доводилось читать О`Генри, и я слышал, что, дескать, уже поздно даже пробовать, но я всё-таки рискнул. Прочёл «Квадратуру круга» за завтраком. Думается… а ведь на белом свете не так много литературных произведений, которые я мог бы себе позволить прочесть за завтраком, ну хотя бы потому, что все хорошие рассказы хоть чуточку, да превосходят своим объёмом миску овсяной каши.
Злая ирония рассказа, как это ни странно, обнадёживает. Казалось бы, что может быть сильнее кровной вражды и жажды мести… Чувак что называется "из глубинки" разгуливает по Нью-Йорку с дробовиком, пытаясь выследить и укокошить своего односельчанина. Развязка сей комичной истории гарантирует возникновение улыбки на вашем лице. Так что, если вы уже «сыты всем этим дерьмом», то я горячо советую ознакомиться с «Квадратурой круга».
Мне прежде не доводилось читать О`Генри, и я слышал, что, дескать, уже поздно даже пробовать, но я всё-таки рискнул. Прочёл «Квадратуру круга» за завтраком. Думается… а ведь на белом свете не так много литературных произведений, которые я мог бы себе позволить прочесть за завтраком, ну хотя бы потому, что все хорошие рассказы хоть чуточку, да превосходят своим объёмом миску овсяной каши.
Злая ирония рассказа, как это ни странно, обнадёживает. Казалось бы, что может быть сильнее кровной вражды и жажды мести… Чувак что называется "из глубинки" разгуливает по Нью-Йорку с дробовиком, пытаясь выследить и укокошить своего односельчанина. Развязка сей комичной истории гарантирует возникновение улыбки на вашем лице. Так что, если вы уже «сыты всем этим дерьмом», то я горячо советую ознакомиться с «Квадратурой круга».
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews