The Duplicity of Hargraves
short story by O. Henry
"The Duplicity of Hargraves" is a short story by the American writer William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry. The story was featured in The Junior Munsey, February 1902, and republished in the volume Sixes and Sevens (1911).
The story features Major Pendelton Talbot, a romanticized figure representing the antebellum South.
Summary
Sixty-eight-year-old Major Pendleton Talbot and his practical spinster daughter Lydia move to Washington, D.C. The Talbots have fallen from their aristocratic past in the South before the American Civil War and are now quite poor. The pair stay at a boarding house in the nation's capital. There they become acquainted with Henry Hopkins Hargraves, an ambitious actor in vaudeville. Hargraves is seemingly spellbound by the Major's tales of his happier past (of which he is writing a book).
Eventually, the Talbots fall behind on their rent. The Major seeks the help of their congressman in getting his book published, but to little avail. The impractical Major spends their last two dollars on play tickets.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7731240. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1902 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Duplicity of Hargraves” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.