The Gift of the Maggie is a short story written by O Henry. It tells the story of a poor young couple giving each other Christmas presents after giving up their love, reflecting the hardships of the American underclass and praising the hero's kind heart and pure love.

Content introduction:

The Gift of Maggie tells a story about Christmas in a small family of the lower class. Jim, the hero, is a small clerk whose salary is only enough to make ends meet, and Della, the heroine, is a virtuous and kind housewife. Their lives are poor, but Jim and Della both have a very precious treasure. Jim has a gold watch and Della has beautiful waterfall hair.

In order to give gifts to each other at Christmas, Jim sold his gold watch and bought a set of pure tortoise shells with jewels on the edge for Della. Della sold her long hair and bought Jim a platinum watch chain. They all gave up their most precious things for each other, and the gifts they got became useless.

Extended data:

The author expresses the pure love between the two protagonists with a simple story, which represents the sadness and joy of the lower class in the United States, and also contains the most important aspect of the "beauty of human nature" that the author wants to express: "selfless love."

In The Gift of the Magi, O Henry takes the beautiful love in the poor life of the broad masses of the lower classes as the theme. He made a sharp and bitter satire on the capitalist society where money was paramount at that time, and praised the broad masses of people for their spirit of caring for each other and self-sacrifice in the struggle and their beautiful love of seeing the truth in adversity. Its infinite artistic charm lies in the fact that the author shows the character characteristics in the plot and pays attention to the actions of the characters in the story, thus revealing the heroic character characteristics of the protagonist and their simple love.

Jim and Della, though just little people living at the bottom of society, are passionate about life and love each other deeply. In the face of these warm feelings, poverty can become insignificant. Although each other's gifts lost their use value to each other in the end, Della and Jim got something more precious than gifts in the world, that is, priceless love.