[Since my response, that I tried to post was just bumped
off somehow, I will try to reproduce it here, and hopefully, it will not be too
late.]
With O. Henry's setting being the turn of the
twentieth century, there may be only one other city that could be the setting for these
three stories--Chicago, Illinois. While Chicago at this time lacked the sophistication
of New York and the bohemian life of Greenwich Village, there is documentation that
artists did congregate in parts of Chicago and the Midwest, though not to the extent
that they did in Greenwich Village where "The Last Leaf" is set. For, in his
U.S.A. Trilogy (published in 1919), John Dos Passos writes of two women who
were aspiring artists. Certainly, for the story "The Cop and the Anthem" Chicago was
urbanized enough to have beat policemen who would encounter a character such as Soapy,
and history records the city's element of criminality at the time to substantiate the
existence of Bob and Jimmy in "After Twenty Years." Of course, Chicago has a similar
climate to that of New York City, so the brutal cold of "The Last Leaf" would be
realistic.
Nevertheless, although the setting of Chicago
has definite verisimilitude, since O. Henry was very familiar with New York, and since
people of his time would perceive New York as much more of a true city than Chicago,
which still was thought of in terms of its stockyards and as part of a state that was
not of the original colonies, it does seem that the setting of New York is more
appropriate.
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