Cabbages and kings

Cabbages and Kings is a 1904 novel written by O. Henry, set in a fictitious Central American country called the Republic of Anchuria.  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 own 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”. It takes its title from the poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, featured in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.