About the book: year / One of the most famous humorists in world literature, O. Henry created a unique panorama of American life at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, conveyed grotesque situations contrasts and paradoxes of their era, which opened up space for people with business acumen, whom the game of chance either lifts to the pinnacle of success, or casts down to the very bottom of life. “Miss Medora Martin arrived with a box of paints and an easel in New York from the village of Harmony, which lies at the foot of the Green Mountains. Miss Medora was like an autumn rose that had been spared by the first frost that had not spared her other sisters. In the village of Harmony, when Miss Medora went to depraved Babylon to study painting, they said about her that she was an extravagant, desperate, headstrong girl. In New York, when she first appeared at the table of a cheap boarding house on the West Side, the residents asked each other: “Who is this pretty old maid?”?..»