O.Henry

O. Henry was the pseudonym for William Sydney Porter, an American short story writer. He was born in Greensboro in 1862, the second son of Dr. Algernon Sidney and Mary Jane Porter. His mother died three years after he was born, and he moved with his father and brother into his aunt Lina's house. His aunt raised him, teaching him literature and art through her tutoring sessions with him. At the age of 15, he went to work in one of his uncle's drugstores. When he was 20, he developed a cough that was actually the onset of tuberculosis. As a result of his declining health, friends of his invited him to Austin, Texas, where he worked both as a druggist, draftsman, and a teller for First National Bank. In 1887, he married Athol Estes, and his wife gave birth to a son the following year. Tragically, his son died shortly after his birth. Margaret, their second child, was born later in 1888, which is when his wife became ill. While he was still employed with First National Bank, he started The Rolling Stone, which was a humor weekly. A year later, it went out of print, and he was also fired from the bank for embezzlement. It was thought that he would be pardoned, because the shortage that was discovered was more than likely due to bad bookkeeping as opposed to criminal intent. In 1895, the case was closed, but reopened the next year. In 1896, he was arrested in Houston. Instead of going to trial, he fled to New Orleans, where he unloaded banana boats. He ended up in Honduras, where he consorted with famous criminals. In one case, his travels were funded by $30,000 from a robbery that one of them committed. In 1897, he swallowed his pride and returned home to be with his dying wife. After she died, he and his daughter moved into his mother-in-law's house, where he waited for his trial. During his residency at this house, his first story "Miracle of Lava Canyon," was published. In 1898, he was found guilty for embezzlement, and began to serve a five year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Ohio. While he was in prison, he started his professional writing career, where he wrote and published more than a dozen stories. He came up with his pen name from Orrin Henry, a prison guard. After serving three years in prison, he was released on good behavior. The following year, he lived with his daughter in Pittsburgh and wrote stories for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, as well as for New York magazines. In 1902, he moved to New York where he began to use the name "O. Henry." The following year, he signed a contract with the New York Sunday World for writing weekly feature short stories. His first book, Cabbages and Kings, was published in 1904. It was written mostly about his experience in Honduras. In 1905 he wrote "The Gift of the Magi," which many consider to be his most famous piece. The products of his writing were amazing in themselves because he consumed an average of two quarts of whiskey a day. In 1906, he published The Four Million, which was a collection that included many of his famous New York stories. In 1907, he married one of his childhood sweethearts, Sara Lindsay Coleman, and published seven additional volumes of his collected short stories. After a six-month illness, tuberculosis combined with alcoholism and diabetes, he died in New York on June 5, 1910. He was buried in Asheville, North Carolina. He reached more popularity after his death. His trademark is his unexpected twist at the ending, hence the term coined in memory of him, "an O. Henry ending." Critics have called him a "writer's writer." . As a very prolific writer, he wrote over 600 short stories which were published in 1917 in 14 volumes.

from "The Gift of the Magi"

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.