O. Henry

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O. Henry was the pen name of American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), whose clever use of twist endings in his stories popularized the term "O. Henry Ending".

Biography

William Sydney Porter was born on the plantation "Worth Place" in Greensboro, North Carolina. His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When William was three, his mother died of consumption, and he and his father moved to the home of his paternal grandmother. William was an avid reader, and graduated from his aunt's elementary school in 1876 then enrolled at the Linsey Street High School. In 1879 he started working as a bookkeeper in his uncle's drugstore. Then, In 1881 at the age of 19, he was licensed as a pharmacist.

He relocated to Texas in 1882, initially working on a ranch in La Salle County as a sheep herder and ranch hand, then Austin where he took a number of different jobs over the next several years, including pharmacist, draftsman, journalist, and clerk. While in Texas he also learned Spanish there. In 1887 he eloped with Athol Estes, then 17 years old and from a wealthy family. They objected to the match because both she and Porter suffered from tuberculosis. Athol gave birth to a son in 1888, who died shortly after birth, and then a daughter, Margaret, in 1889.

In 1894 Porter started a humorous weekly called The Rolling Stone. Also in 1894, Porter resigned from the First National Bank of Austin where he had worked as a teller, after he was accused of embezzling funds. In 1895, after The Rolling Stone ceased publication, he moved to Houston, where he started writing for the Houston Post. After being arrested for embezzlement and being granted bond, Porter absconded to New Orleans and on to Honduras the day before he was due to stand trial on July 7, 1896. However, In 1897, when he learnt that his wife was dying, he returned to the United States and surrendered to the court, pending an appeal. Athol Estes Porter died July 25, 1897. Porter was found guilty of embezzlement, sentenced to five years jail, and imprisoned April 25, 1898 at the Ohio State Penitentiary. He was released on July 24, 1901 for good behaviour after serving three years.

Porter published at least 12 stories while in prison to help support his daughter. Not wanting his readers to know he was in jail, he started using the pen name O. Henry. It is believed that Porter got this name from one of the guards who was named Orrin Henry. Other sources say that the name was derived from his calling "Oh Henry!" after the family cat, Henry. Guy Davenport wrote that the name was a condensation of "Ohio Penitentiary". He continued using the pen name full time when he took a writing contract for Ainslee's Magazine in New York City, shortly after his release from prison.

He married again in 1907 to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsey Coleman. Despite the success of his short stories being published in magazines and collections, Porter became an alcoholic. Sarah left him in 1909, and he died in 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver. After funeral services in New York City, he was buried in Ashville, North Carolina. His daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, died in 1927 and was buried next to her father.

Stories

Most of O.Henry's stories are set in his contemporary present, the early years of the 20th century. Many take place in New York City, and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses. He opens The Four Million with a reference to Ward McAllister's "assertion that there were only 'Four Hundred' people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen—the census taker—and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the 'Four Million.'" To O. Henry, everyone in New York counted. He had an obvious affection for the city, which he called Baghdad on the Subway. But others are set in small towns and in other cities. His famous story A Municipal Report opens by quoting Frank Norris: "Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco." Thumbing his nose at Norris, O. Henry sets the story in Nashville.

Fundamentally a product of his time, O. Henry's work provides one of the best English examples of catching the entire flavor of an age. Whether roaming the cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the "gentle grifter," or investigating the tensions of class and wealth in turn of the century New York, O. Henry had an inimitable hand for isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of language. Some of his best and least-known work resides in the collection "The World and the Door," a series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy South 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.

His most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi", concerns a young couple who are short of money but desperately want to buy each other Christmas gifts. Unbeknownst to Jim, Della sells her most valuable possession, her beautiful hair, in order to buy a platinum fob chain for Jim's watch; unbeknownst to Della, Jim sells his most valuable possession, his watch, to buy jewelled combs for Della's hair (Steve Martin later spoofed this story). O.Henry's first wife, Athol, was probably the model for Della.

The Ransom of Red Chief concerns two men who kidnap a boy of ten. The boy turns out to be so bratty and obnoxious that the desperate men ultimately pay the boy's father two hundred and fifty dollars to take him back.

O. Henry once said, "There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands."

The O. Henry Awards are yearly prizes given to outstanding short stories.

The O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships are held in May of each year in Austin, Texas, hosted by the city's O. Henry Museum.

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