O. Henry
(1862–1910)
O. Henry's real name was William Sydney Porter. The son of a doctor, he grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. When he was twenty, he moved to Texas for reasons of health. He settled in Austin, where he worked as a clerk, bookkeeper, and bank teller. To earn more money, he began contributing news items and sketches to newspapers throughout the country, and in 1895, he moved to Houston to work as a reporter for the Houston Post. Nine months later he was called back to Austin to stand trial for bank embezzlement. Porter was almost certainly innocent of the charge. The bank he had worked for was notoriously lax in its accounting procedures, and Porter himself had probably been careless. He boarded a train to Austin, but on impulse he went to New Orleans instead, and then to Honduras in Central America. Three years later, the news that his wife was seriously ill brought him back to Texas. He stood trial, was convicted, and served five years in prison.
When he was released, he went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he began once again to write. His editors encouraged him to move to New York. It was in New York that Porter adopted the pen name O. Henry and became a famous writer of short stories. He was a prolific writer. In 1905 alone, he wrote sixty-five short stories. In his stories, he drew on his experiences out West and in Latin America. Above all, he drew on his knowledge of and fascination with New York, whose streets he roamed in search of ideas. He called New York "Baghdad-on-the-Subway," comparing it to the fabulous city of Scheherazade's A Thousand and One Nights. Some of his best stories are collected in The Four Million, The Voice of the City, Hearts of the West, The Gentle Grafter, and Whirligigs.
