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The Gift of the Magi

A young couple with almost no money each sell their most precious thing to buy the other a Christmas present.
  • O. Henry (1862–1910)
  • First published 1905
  • Short story
  • Available online · Awaiting physical preservation
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The Gift of the Magi

The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s

Provenance

Where this text came from, and why it is free to share

Source

First printed in the New York Sunday World (December 1905).

Transcribed text: ebook 7256 at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7256, released there 2005-01-01 (that is the transcription's date, not the book's). Copied 2026-10-30. Its own record says: “Public domain in the USA.”

Checksums (SHA-256): source file 34547c81f26819b9474cd9bc19fbcb66232f4dffe684688c37d07000961a60af; prepared text d3fe9671f3a9c391c11e788785d604037c08557d0b8eac0b020f3ee230598e6e.

Changes to the text

  • The source's header, licence, footer and production credits were removed.
  • Line breaks inside paragraphs were joined; paragraphs and short-line blocks such as contents lists were kept.
  • Underscores marking italics were removed.
  • Extra spaces were collapsed.
  • No illustrations were imported; captions stay as text.

Rights

  • First published before 1931: public domain in the United States.
  • The author died before 1956: out of copyright where protection lasts the author's life plus 70 years.

Public domain in the United States (first published 1905); the author died in 1910, so also out of copyright where protection lasts the author's life plus 70 years. Not reviewed country by country beyond that.

Text only. The source's licence, trademark and boilerplate are removed, so the archive does not use the source's name as a mark; the source is cited as provenance.

Reviewed 2026-10-30, batch seed-2026-10. Archive editions credit the original author; Aurelune printed them and claims no rights in the text.

The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry · Aurelune