Lecture IX o. Henry (1862-1910)

O. Henry’s real name was William Sydney Porter.

He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1862, during the Civil War. His mother died when he was three. His father, a doctor by profession, spent all his life working on inventions of all kinds, none of which was ever a success. He was brought up by his aunt, who had a private school. He read a lot and was fond of drawing. At 15 he became a clerk in his uncle’s drug store, where he worked for five years.

At 19 he went to Texas to work on a ranch. Two years on the ranch acquainted him with cowboy life and cowboy stories of the West. Porter learned to speak French, Spanish and German. In 1884 he became a bank teller in Austin. In 1887 he married “secretly” Atol Astes. Their first baby, the boy, died. But in 1889, Atol gave birth to a daughter, Margaret. Porter was a happy husband and father, but his happiness didn’t last long.

One day a theft of 1000 dollars was discovered in the bank where he worked. Though it was not he who had taken the money, Porter was accused of embezzlement. He was not guilty, so he fled to Honduras, Central America. Later he described this experience in his first book, the only novel “Cabbages and Kings” (1904).

He returned home only because of his wife’s illness. He risked arrest by doing so, but he devoted himself to his dying wife for the remaining six months of her life. After her death and his trial in 1898, he served a term of three years and three months in prison in Ohio.

In prison he was made a druggist. While in prison he began to write short stories for the magazines under the penname of O. Henry. His first story “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Present” was published in 1899; and Porter’s daughter received a Christmas present. Margaret was unaware of his fate, she lived with her relatives.

When O. Henry was released from prison in 1901, he went to New York to begin again. The city suggested so many plots to him, that sometimes he wrote as many as seven stories a month. In 1906 he published his first collection of stories “The Four Million”, later he issued eight more such collections.

In 1907 he married Sally Coleman, the girlfriend of his youth. But illness and overwork hastened his death. He died of a stroke in 1910 when he was 48. He had already achieved world-wide fame.

His last words were spoken with a smile, “Turn up the lights, I don’t want to go home in the dark”.

O. Henry’s Creative Work

O. Henry is one of the most widely published modern authors. His works have been translated into nearly every language. He is the author of 273 short stories and one novel.

Today the desire to read him is as persistent as ever. His works reflected a specific period in American literature – the turn of the century. O. Henry occupied an intermediate position between the critical tendency in literature and that of the “genteel tradition” in the neo-romantic trend.

The years 1905-1910 were the most productive ones. They were marked by his criticism of the social system. His comments on society had considerable force.

O. Henry was announced a tender humorist. He worked out and enriched all types of the short story: the anecdote, the monologue, the dialogue and the grotesque; the adventure story and the psychological story; poems in prose, tales and sketches. Everything that O. Henry experienced and witnessed filtered into his stories, but he was most famous for his stories of city life. He wrote about 150 stories with a New York background. He can be called one of New York’s biographers.

His works reflected O. Henry’s absorbing interest in the ordinary man and woman, as opposed to the wealthy. His skilful plots, his puns and humour, his use of coined words and local idiom, his sentimentality, and above all, his surprise finale made his tales enormously popular.

Some of his most famous short stories:

“The Last Leaf”,

“The Gift of the Magi”,

“The Ransom of Red Chief”,

“The Roads We Take”.

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.