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O. Henry (1862-1910) was a prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings, who wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City. A twist of plot, which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance, is typical of O. Henry's stories.

William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) was born in Greenboro, North Carolina. His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his paternal grandmother and aunt. William was an avid reader, but at the age of fifteen he left school, and then worked in a drug store and on a Texas ranch. He moved to Houston, where he had a number of jobs, including that of bank clerk. After moving to Austin, Texas, in 1882, he married.

In 1884 he started a humorous weekly The Rolling Stone. When the weekly failed, he joined the Houston Post as a reporter and columnist. In 1897 he was convicted of embezzling money, although there has been much debate over his actual guilt. In 1898 he entered a penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio.

While in prison O. Henry started to write short stories to earn money to support his daughter Margaret. His first work, "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking" (1899), appeared in McClure's Magazine. After doing three years of the five years sentence, Porter emerged from the prison in 1901 and changed his name to O. Henry.

O. Henry moved to New York City in 1902 and from December 1903 to January 1906 he wrote a story a week for the New York World, also publishing in other magazines. Henry's first collection, Cabbages And Kings appeared in 1904. The second, The Four Million, was published two years later and included his well-known stories "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Furnished Room". The Trimmed Lamp (1907) included "The Last Leaf". Henry's best known work is perhaps the much anthologized "The Ransom of Red Chief", included in the collection Whirligigs (1910). The Heart Of The West (1907) presented tales of the Texas range. O. Henry published 10 collections and over 600 short stories during his lifetime.

O. Henry's last years were shadowed by alcoholism, ill health, and financial problems. He married Sara Lindsay Coleman in 1907, but the marriage was not happy, and they separated a year later. O. Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver on June 5, 1910, in New York. Three more collections, Sixes And Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912) and Waifs And Strays (1917), appeared posthumously.

Henry, O.
Henry, O., pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), American writer of short stories, best known for his ironic plot twists and surprise endings. Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, O. Henry attended school only until age 15, when he dropped out to work in his uncle’s drugstore. During his 20s he moved to Texas, where he worked for more than ten years as a clerk and a bank teller. O. Henry did not write professionally until he reached his mid-30s, when he sold several pieces to the Detroit Free Press and the Houston Daily Post. In 1894 he founded a short-lived weekly humor magazine, The Rolling Stone.

In 1896 O. Henry was charged with embezzling funds from the First National Bank of Austin, Texas, where he had worked from 1891 to 1894. The amount of money was small and might have been an accounting error; however, he chose to flee to Honduras rather than stand trial. Learning that his wife was dying, he returned to Texas in 1897 and, after her death, turned himself in to authorities. He served three years of a five-year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, where he first began to write short stories and use the pseudonym O. Henry.

Released from prison, O. Henry moved to New York City in 1901 and began writing full time. In his stories he made substantial use of his knowledge of Texas, Central America, and life in prison. He also became fascinated by New York street life, which provided a setting for many of his later stories. During the last ten years of his life, O. Henry became one of the most popular writers in America, publishing over 500 short stories in dozens of widely read periodicals.

O. Henry’s most famous stories, such as “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Furnished Room,” and “The Ransom of Red Chief,” make simple yet effective use of paradoxical coincidences to produce ironic endings. For example, in “The Gift of the Magi” a husband sells his watch to buy his wife a Christmas present of a pair of hair combs; unbeknownst to him, she cuts and sells her long hair to buy him a Christmas present of a new chain for his watch. His style of storytelling became a model not only for short fiction, but also for American motion pictures and television programs.

Writing at the rate of more than one story per week, O. Henry published ten collections of stories during a career that barely spanned a decade. They are Cabbages and Kings (1904), 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). The collections Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912), and Waifs and Strays (1917) were published after his death. In 1919 the O. Henry Memorial Awards for the best American short stories published each year were founded by the Society of Arts and Sciences. The Complete Works of O. Henry was published in 1953.