O. Henry
(1862–1910)
O. Henry wrote his short story "A Retrieved Reformation" while he was a prisoner in the Ohio federal penitentiary, serving time for embezzling funds from a Texas bank. The character of Jimmy Valentine—the criminal with a heart—was based on a safecracker that O. Henry knew in prison. As Alias Jimmy Valentine, O. Henry’s story became a successful Broadway play.
O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter, who grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and became an apprentice to a pharmacist. He moved to Texas to work on an uncle’s ranch. Later he was a bookkeeper, a bank teller, a newspaper writer, and owner of a weekly newspaper called The Rolling Stone. When he was summoned for trial on the embezzlement charge, he jumped bail and fled to Honduras. A year and a half later, when he returned to Texas to visit his dying wife, he was arrested and spent the next three years in jail. By 1903 he was in New York City, where he roamed the parks, streets, and restaurants, talking to people and collecting story material. His stories—more than two hundred fifty in all—became immensely popular.
You can almost count on an O. Henry story to have a surprise ending. Two of his other stories that you might enjoy are "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief."
