O. Henry: America's Best Short Story Writer

William Sydney Porter was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina and died June 5, 1910 in New York City. As a child, Porter, whose mother died from tuberculosis when he was three, found refuge in reading. At the age of nineteen he became a licensed pharmacist, but his artistic talents came to the fore even then; he often entertained customers of the drug store where he worked by doing drawings of them.



In 1882, hoping the change of climate would help cure a persistent cough he'd developed, Porter moved to La Salle County Texas with Dr. James K. Hall, and lived on the sheep ranch of Hall's son, Richard. In 1884, Porter moved to Austin where he lived with friends of Richard. In Austin he did an assortment of jobs, writing as a sideline. When his friend Richard Hall became Texas Land Commissioner in 1887, he offered Porter a job as a draftsman in the General Land Office, where he did maps from surveys and field notes. While working in the land office, Porter began developing characters and plots for the stories that later made him famous.



Porter also did a humorous weekly publication called The Rolling Stone, and when he lost a job he held in a bank after resigning from the land office, he began working full time on it. The Rolling Stone featured satire on politics and culture, and carried Porter's short stories and sketches. Perhaps because he poked fun at some of the most powerful people in Texas, the publication failed, and Porter moved to Houston where he obtained employment with The Houston Post.



In Houston, Porter was again indicted for embezzlement, but fled to Honduras before he could be arrested. Holed up in a hotel in Trujillo, he continued to write, and coined the term banana republic in his story Cabbages and Kings to describe Honduras. When his wife fell ill with tuberculosis and was dying, Porter returned to the U.S. and turned himself in. He was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in jail in 1898. While serving his sentence at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Porter wrote under a number of pseudonyms, but became best known as O. Henry, a pen name he first used over the story "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking:" in the December 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine. His stories were mailed to publishers by a friend who lived in New Orleans, so they never knew the author was a prisoner. He was released for good behavior after serving only three years



After his release in 1901, he moved first to Philadelphia to live with his daughter, who never knew he had been in prison, and subsequently moved to New York City in 1902 to be closer to his publishers. From 1902 until his health began to fail in 1908, Porter wrote a story a week. His colorful characters and plot twists were popular with readers but often panned by critics.



A heavy drinker, Porter died on June 5, 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver, complications from diabetes and an enlarged heart. Though he led a tragic life, losing his first wife at a relatively young age, and being driven to drink excessively despite, or perhaps because of, his success; O. Henry is my all time favorite short story writer. He wrote stories that the average person could relate to and enjoy. Stories with surprise endings and with witty narration; he wrote stories about people that readers could identify with, and described the age in which he lived better than any writer of his time. While the critics might not have liked him, he stands as the most influential short fiction writer of the early twentieth century.



References:



www.lsjunction.com/people/porter.htm



www.answers.com/topic/o-henry



www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/O._Henry