AI.Summarizer

The Last Leaf: Summary & Analysis

O. Henry Suspense / Twist ending Short story

Published · Updated

This is a summary. Read the full text.

Summary of The Last Leaf

The Last Leaf is a 1907 short story by O. Henry set in Greenwich Village, about Johnsy, a young artist dying of pneumonia who has convinced herself she will die when the last leaf falls from the ivy vine outside her window. Her roommate Sue and their downstairs neighbor, a failed old painter named Behrman who has spent decades dreaming of creating a masterpiece, watch helplessly as the leaves fall one by one, until a single leaf clings on through a storm and gives Johnsy the will to recover — a leaf Behrman, unseen, painted onto the wall himself the night before, at the cost of his own life to pneumonia caught while doing it.

Plot summary

O. Henry withholds the story's central revelation until its final lines, using his signature twist to recast the entire narrative once the reader learns what Behrman actually did.

Beginning

Johnsy, a young artist, lies gravely ill with pneumonia in her Greenwich Village apartment, having fixed her mind on the superstitious belief that she will die when the last leaf falls from the ivy vine visible outside her window. Her friend and roommate Sue, alarmed by Johnsy's fatalism, fails to talk her out of the idea and instead seeks help from Behrman, an old, unsuccessful painter who lives downstairs and has talked for forty years about painting a masterpiece he has never begun.

Rising action

Behrman mocks Johnsy's superstition as foolish but is visibly moved by Sue's account of it. That night, a fierce storm strips more leaves from the vine, and Sue dreads what Johnsy will find in the morning. When dawn comes, however, a single leaf still clings to the vine despite the storm, and Johnsy, watching it survive a second night, begins to reconsider her fatalism.

Ending

Johnsy recovers over the following days as the mysteriously persistent leaf remains in place through further bad weather. Only afterward does Sue learn the truth: Behrman had gone out into the storm that first night and painted a leaf on the wall outside Johnsy's window himself, catching pneumonia in the process; he dies in the hospital days later, having finally created — unrecognized, at the cost of his life — the masterpiece he had talked about for decades.

Characters & setting

O. Henry builds Behrman as a comic, blustering failure specifically so that the revelation of his sacrifice lands with maximum emotional force.

Johnsy

Johnsy's illness is as much psychological as physical — her recovery begins the moment she regains the will to live, which the story ties directly to her changed relationship with the leaf outside her window.

Sue

Sue's practical devotion to her sick friend — nursing her, seeking help, working to support them both — provides the story's grounded emotional core, in contrast to both Johnsy's fatalism and Behrman's grand, unrealized artistic ambitions.

Behrman

Behrman's decades of failure as a painter, and his gruff dismissal of Johnsy's superstition, make his secret act of self-sacrifice all the more striking: his true masterpiece turns out to be an act of anonymous kindness rather than the grand canvas he always claimed he would paint.

Themes, symbols & analysis

The Last Leaf is among O. Henry's most anthologized stories precisely because its twist ending recontextualizes a minor, background character as the story's real hero.

Art and sacrifice

Behrman's lifelong ambition to paint a masterpiece is fulfilled, ironically, not on canvas but on a brick wall, in a work meant to be mistaken for nature rather than admired as art — a definition of masterpiece measured by its effect rather than its recognition.

Hope and the will to live

Johnsy's fatalistic link between the falling leaves and her own death, and her recovery once the link is broken, dramatizes a recurring idea in the story that psychological hope has real, physical consequences for survival.

Selflessness and anonymous sacrifice

Behrman's act is deliberately unwitnessed and unclaimed — he never tells anyone what he has done — which the story treats as the truest form of generosity, contrasted against his earlier, empty talk of the masterpiece he would someday paint for recognition.

More poems, stories and plays to read

Summaries of related works, or see all poems, stories and plays in the library.