文档介绍：Chapter 5 The Age of Realism
Realist literature is based on the accurate, unromanticized observation of human expd scientist in accurate description, interpretation, and ，仔细描述、解读和分类
Works
The Rise of Silas Lapham
《塞拉斯•拉帕姆的发迹》
A Chance Acquaintance 《偶然相遇》
A Modern Instance 《一个现代例证》
Criticism and Fiction 《批评与小说》
Author
O. Henry (1862-1910) was a prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings, who wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City. A twist of plot, which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance, is typical of O. Henry's stories.
William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) was born in North Carolina. His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his paternal grandmother and aunt. William was an avid reader, but at the age of fifteen he left school, and then worked in a drug store and on a Texas farm. He moved to Houston, where he had a number of jobs, including that of bank clerk. After moving to Austin, Texas, in 1882, he married.
In 1884 he started a humorous weekly The Rolling Stone. When the weekly failed, he joined the Houston Post as a reporter and columnist. In 1897 he was convicted of embezzling money, although there has been much debate over his actual guilt. In 1898, unfortunately， he was kept in prison at Columbus, Ohio for three years in his thirties， though he had done nothing wrong. It was there that he began to write short stories to earn money to support his daughter Margaret. His first work, "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking" (1899), appeared in McClure's Magazine. After doing three years of the five years sentence, Porter emerged from the prison in 1901 and changed his name to O. Henry.
O. Henry moved to New York City in 1902 and from December 1903 to January 1906 he wrote a story a week for the New York World, also publishing in other magazines. Henry's first collection, Cabbages A