The only monograph on O. Henry in China until now is written by Ruan Wenling in his Going in to the Maze--- the Artistic Word of O. Henry, published in 1997. This book mainly focuses on the analysis of the themes and writing skills of O. Henry’s works. Ruan Wenling has done many researches on O. Henry from perspectives of O. Henry’s life, characters, surprising endings and writing styles.

Most of the other researches focus on analyzing O. Henry’s surprise endings, themes of the stories, narrative techniques and writing styles, and often only commenting on one or two of O. Henry’s works. 

Humor, as one of the most significant features of O. Henry’s short stories, has been discussed by Chinese scholars. For example, Pu Lili (2009) does a comparatively comprehensive analysis of O. Henry’s humorous writing style from the perspective of wording, surprise endings and rhetorical techniques in her article “Analysis of O. Henry’s Humorous Writing Style”. Also, Zhuang Yulan (2014) analyzes O. Henry’s humorous writing style in her thesis on O. Henry’s Humorous Writing Style from the similar perspectives.

Even though these two theses comprehensively analyze O. Henry’s humorous writing style from similar perspectives, their weakness is that they both lack analysis of relationship between O. Henry’s humor and the social background of the United States in the early 20th century. 

O. Henry’s humor could be defined as black humor for his humor indicates the very dark side of capitalist world. Research on Black Humor in O. Henry’s Short Stories by Gao Jie studies O. Henry’s black humor in a more specific way. 

Guo Houwen and Wu Na（2006）also have an integral analysis on O. Henry’s humor in their article “Analysis of O. Henry’s Humorous and Its Realistic Meaning”.

However, those scholars have analyzed O. Henry’s humor from a very general perspective while some interesting details and plots could be easily neglected. Thus, specific analysis of single short story is also important to help readers to go deeper down to the very details of some of O. Henry’s best humorous short stories and have a more comprehensive understanding of O. Henry’s humorous writing style.