O. Henry

William Sydney Porter — better known to the world as O. Henry — believed that every face in a crowded city street carried a story, if only a man had the patience to listen. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1862, lost his mother when he was small, and was raised largely by an aunt who taught him to love books. He grew up to be a pharmacist, drifted west to Texas, tried his hand at ranch work, drawing, journalism, and clerking in a bank. The bank, unhappily, lost some of its money, and the law decided that Porter was to blame. He fled to Honduras; came home when his wife fell gravely ill; and, when she had died, gave himself up and went to prison in Ohio for three years.

It was in that prison that O. Henry was born. Porter borrowed the name from somewhere — he never said quite where — and began sending short stories out to magazines, signed by a stranger no one in New York had ever met. When he came out, he moved to New York City, the great noisy stage he would call his “Bagdad on the Subway,” and he wrote, and wrote, and wrote. He produced hundreds of stories in only a few years, gathered into collections such as The Four Million and Cabbages and Kings. He wrote about shop girls counting their pennies, clerks in cheap boarding houses, tramps on park benches, and small-time swindlers who were not nearly as clever as they thought. “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Last Leaf,” “The Ransom of Red Chief,” “The Cop and the Anthem” — these became his best-loved tales, and a reader is advised to come to them without knowing too much, for O. Henry liked to keep a little something tucked up his sleeve until the very last line.

What drove him as a writer was a deep and stubborn affection for the ordinary person. He had been poor himself, and disgraced, and lonely in a strange country, and he understood that the small kindness, the foolish hope, the secret sacrifice, were the great events of most lives. He wrote quickly, often under the pressure of a deadline and a thirsty glass at his elbow, and the years of hard living caught up with him in 1910, when he died in New York at the age of forty-seven. He left behind a great many stories, and an annual prize for short fiction that still bears his name — which is to say, a stranger’s name, which is to say, his own.