Cabbages and Kings

„Cabbages and Kings” is a 1904 novel made up of interlinked short stories, written by O. Henry and set in a fictitious country. A series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town called the Republic of Anchuria while each advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another in a complex structure which slowly explicates its own background even as it painstakingly erects a town which is one of the most detailed literary creations of the period. This work is O. Henry’s first published volume and is considered to be his only novel. The plot is composed of several short stories, which were inspired by the author’s six-month stay in Honduras in the late 1890s. In this book, O. Henry coined the term „banana republic”.