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Do you know who William Sydney Porter is?

 Actually, you know! I am sure, everybody know him as O. Henry... 

O. Henry
Born	William Sidney Porter September 11, 1862 Greensboro, North Carolina
Died	June 5, 1910 (aged 47) New York City
Pen name	O. Henry, Olivier Henry, Oliver Henry
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American

BIOGRAPHY

   After Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe, William Sydney Porter is the most read author in the world and bears the title “master of the short story”. William Sydney Porter, also known as O.Henry, was born on September 11, 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. His mother, Mary Jane Porter, died when he was three and his father, a medical doctor, began to care more about alcohol than his practice. His grandmother was given the task of raising him and a younger sibling. She also was responsible for their extensive education. Porter was an avid reader and, by age nineteen, had read a wide variety of books and articles that would later influence his literary works. He moved to Texas in 1884 to be with friends because they were concerned about a chronic cough that had plagued him from childhood. In Texas, he got married and obtained a job as a bank teller at one of the local banks. When faced with charges of bank fraud from the bank he fled to New Orleans and then to Honduras. There in Honduras he split his time between Trujillo and Roatan.  Little is known of his activities there, although his experiences in Honduras would later be incorporated into some of his stories. He returned to the states when word came that his wife, Athol, was losing her battle with tuberculosis. On his return he was convicted for bank fraud. He was sentenced to three years in an Ohio penitentiary, where he began writing short stories. Ashamed to be in prison, he hid this fact from everyone, even his own daughter, by adopting the alias O. Henry. 

Porter family in early 1890s—Athol, daughter Margaret, William

Porter in Austin as a young man

STORIES

          O. Henry's stories frequently have surprise endings. In his day, he was called the American answer to Guy de Maupassant. Both authors wrote plot twist endings, but O. Henry stories were much more playful. His stories are also known for witty narration.Two themes that are trademarks of William Sydney Porter’s stories are his reversal of the narrative and his reversal of a character’s nature. In simple terms Porter begins a story in one direction and just when the reader thinks they can predict the ending, he sends it in a totally different direction. In his stories, people who are characterized as one thing, often are the complete opposite. Most of O. Henry's stories are set in his own time, the early 20th century. Many take place in New York City and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses, etc O. Henry's work is wide-ranging, and his characters can be found roaming the cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the con-man, 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 is contained in Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories each of which explores some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town, while advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another.                 Cabbages and Kings was his first collection of stories, followed by The Four Million. The second collection opens 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.        

         American Writers wrote, “The stories usually have a comic tone, to be sure, but distinctly uncomic possibilities often exist just at the fringes.” Although Porter was widely popular in his own time, today his reputation has suffered. Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 78, said “Perhaps the reputation of no other American writer has undergone a more rapid and drastic reversal than that of William Sydney Porter.” It also says that while “Porter commanded a readership of millions” he now is not as interesting to readers as he is to critics in today's time. But although he may not have the popularity that he had in the 1900’s, his works are still considered literary classics are still read worldwide.

Among his most famous stories are:

• "The Gift of the Magi" about 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; while unbeknownst to Della, Jim sells his own most valuable possession, his watch, to buy jeweled combs for Della's hair. The essential premise of this story has been copied, re-worked, parodied, and otherwise re-told countless times in the century since it was written.
• "The Ransom of Red Chief", in which two men 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 $250 to take him back.
• "The Cop and the Anthem" about a New York City hobo named Soapy, who sets out to get arrested so that he can be a guest of the city jail instead of sleeping out in the cold winter. Despite efforts at petty theft, vandalism, disorderly conduct, and "mashing" with a young prostitute, Soapy fails to draw the attention of the police. Disconsolate, he pauses in front of a church, where an organ anthem inspires him to clean up his life—and is ironically charged for loitering and sentenced to three months in prison.
• "A Retrieved Reformation", which tells the tale of safecracker Jimmy Valentine, recently freed from prison. He goes to a town bank to case it before he robs it. As he walks to the door, he catches the eye of the banker's beautiful daughter. They immediately fall in love and Valentine decides to give up his criminal career. He moves into the town, taking up the identity of Ralph Spencer, a shoemaker. Just as he is about to leave to deliver his specialized tools to an old associate, a lawman who recognizes him arrives at the bank. Jimmy and his fiancée and her family are at the bank, inspecting a new safe, when a child accidentally gets locked inside the airtight vault. Knowing it will seal his fate, Valentine opens the safe to rescue the child. However, much to Valentine's surprise, the lawman denies recognizing him and lets him go.
• "The Duplicity of Hargraves". A short story about a nearly destitute father and daughter's trip to Washington, D.C.

PEN NAME

         Porter gave various explanations for the origin of his pen name. In 1909 he gave an interview to The New York Times, in which he gave an account of it:

It was during these New Orleans days that I adopted my pen name of O. Henry. I said to a friend: "I'm going to send out some stuff. I don't know if it amounts to much, so I want to get a literary alias. Help me pick out a good one." He suggested that we get a newspaper and pick a name from the first list of notables that we found in it. In the society columns we found the account of a fashionable ball. "Here we have our notables," said he. We looked down the list and my eye lighted on the name Henry, "That'll do for a last name," said I. "Now for a first name. I want something short. None of your three-syllable names for me." "Why don’t you use a plain initial letter, then?" asked my friend. "Good," said I, "O is about the easiest letter written, and O it is."

A newspaper once wrote and asked me what the O stands for. I replied, "O stands for Olivier, the French for Oliver." And several of my stories accordingly appeared in that paper under the name Olivier Henry.

         In the introduction to The World of O. Henry: Roads of Destiny and Other Stories (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), William Trevor writes that when Porter was in the Ohio State Penitentiary "there was a prison guard named Orrin Henry, whom William Sydney Porter . . . immortalised as O. Henry".

          The writer and scholar Guy Davenport offers another explanation: "[T]he pseudonym that he began to write under in prison is constructed from the first two letters of Ohio and the second and last two of penitentiary ".

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