Excerpt from Nine Humorous Tales It may be more than mere accident that in the history of modern literature so many men of talent have turned from the practice of medicine to the profession of letters. The physician's office is largely a place of confession and his mind a focus gathering the light of human experiences from every angle. These, if he is a man of imagination as well as of science, he is prompted to reflect through the lens of fiction. Though Anton Chekhov was a physician by training, (having been graduated from the Moscow University in 1884, at the age of twenty-four) he was a writer by preference. The wide knowledge gained from his medical studies and practice, coupled with the fact that his father was a peasant by birth and a city shop-keeper by occupation, must have contributed in great measure to the wide scope of his art. American readers are by this time fairly well acquainted with Chekhov as a writer of many-sided interests and the possessor of a style that has been called the best since de Maupassant. One phase of the great Russian's work, however, has thus far been largely neglected; his humorous vein. This is all the more surprising because the Chekhov of the humorous tales naturally prompts comparison with our own O. Henry, although it would be unfair to both writers to extend the comparison too far. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.