William Sydney Porter

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Porter, William Sydney (1862–1910), best known by his pseudonym O. Henry, was born in North Carolina, where after a brief schooling he worked in a drugstore. In 1882 he went to Texas to seek his fortune, and after trying his hand at various types of work, including a position as teller in an Austin bank (1891–94), founded a humorous weekly, The Rolling Stone (1894–95), and wrote for a Houston paper (1895–96) a daily column whose main staple was humorous anecdotes. In 1896 he was indicted for alleged embezzlement of funds at the bank for which he had worked. Since the bank was loosely run and his loss of a small sum was a case of technical mismanagement rather than crime, he might have been acquitted had he not fled to Honduras, from which he returned to Austin when his wife was on her deathbed. During his three‐year imprisonment, he began to write short stories based on the life he knew in Texas, Honduras, and elsewhere, and it was the penitentiary ordeal that changed him from a newspaper columnist to a mature author.

After his release he went to New York (1902) to continue his literary career, and remained there for the rest of his life, making the city the scene of much of his fiction. As a contributor to magazines he became immensely popular, turning out stories at the rate of one a week. Cabbages and Kings (1904), his first book, is a series of stories of revolution and adventure in Latin America, integrated by a loose general plot and a single group of characters into the form of a novel. His later collections of stories followed each other with great rapidity: The Four Million (1906), Heart of the West (1907), The Trimmed Lamp (1907), The Gentle Grafter (1908), The Voice of the City (1908), Options (1909), Roads of Destiny (1909), Whirligigs (1910), and Strictly Business (1910). He had written so prolifically that after his death posthumous collections continued to appear, including Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1913), Waifs and Strays (1917), and Postscripts (1923). A Retrieved Reformation, his story of a reformed burglar, was the basis of Paul Armstrong's popular play Alias Jimmy Valentine (1909).

Although his stories are set in many parts of the U.S., as well as in Central and South America, Porter is best known for his observations on the diverse lives of everyday New Yorkers, “the four million” neglected by other writers. He had a fine gift of humor and was adept at the ingenious depiction of ironic circumstances, in plots frequently dependent upon coincidence. A master in presenting vignettes of the whirligig of fortune, he saw life always in episodic form and was incapable of longer unified work or any philosophic generalization of his fatalistic outlook. His characters, plain, simple people, and his plots, depending often on the surprise ending, have little diversification, but he was skilled at ringing the changes on a few themes. The Gift of the Magi and The Furnished Room, in The Four Million, are among the best known of the tales that illustrate his technique of ironic coincidence and the surprise ending. O. Henry Encore (1939) is a collection of stories and illustrations recovered from his early contributions to the Houston Post.

William Sydney Porter see O. Henry .

Porter, William Sydney, see Henry, O.