According to biographer David Stuart, in late autumn 1905, a new World editor decided Henry’s salary far exceeded his output and ordered him fired. Unbeknownst to Henry, the World still wanted him to write up until his contract expired in December. So it came as a shock to Henry when, shortly before the World’s big Christmas special edition came out on December 10, an office boy knocked on his apartment door looking for a contribution. The lackey wasn’t leaving without a story so O. Henry sat down and banged out “Gift of the Magi” in “two feverish hours” according to the faded plaque outside his apartment building. It fit Henry’s pattern of writing overnight, on deadline, and delivering at the last minute, but usually with pristine copy that didn’t require much editorial heavy lifting.
On the whole, “Gift of the Magi” encapsulates the best of what O. Henry stories accomplish, a brief lived-in human experience. One that is often, for good, bad, or in-between, given over to an unwanted fate, only to be rescued through a combination of sentimentality and his patented surprise ending.
“O. Henry had a strong sense of form; if you read a story of his blind, you’d be able to identify it as an O. Henry story by the movement of the action, leading up to his famous trick—the twist at the end,” says Furman. “The twist is really a wringing out of the plot elements and revealing something that was there all along but the reader hadn’t noticed. He was less interested in style than in getting a reaction from his reader. That performative aspect of his stories and his relationship to the reader as audience has appeal to writers now.”
Despite the plaque on 55 Irving Place, the question of where O. Henry scribbled down his masterwork remains an open one. Folklore handed down from generations of the tavern’s owners claims it was authored inside Pete’s—a sacred booth includes multiple pictures and a handwritten letter O. Henry wrote as William Sydney Porter deferring on a dinner invitation—but at least one dissenter claims it was authored in Henry’s apartment. Written in 1936, The Quiet Lodger of Irving Place is a series of reminisces about O. Henry’s time in New York City by his friend and colleague William Wash Williams. In it, Williams says “Gift of the Magi” was written in the room O. Henry rented. No official documentation exists either way, but what truly matters is the story has become synonymous with Pete’s Tavern, the New York City holiday season, and the wonderfully brighly festooned intersection of the two.