O. Henry. Cabbages and Kings

O. Henry was the pen name of the American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910). O. Henry's short stories are well-known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.
A series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town while each advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another in a complex structure which slowly explicates its background even as it painstakingly erects a town which is one of the most detailed literary creations of the period.
In this book, O. Henry coined the term "banana republic".