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Unit 6: After Twenty Years by O. Henry

Pen name Notes

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.”

Legacy
The O. Henry Award is a prestigious annual prize named after Porter and given to outstanding
short stories. Several schools around the country bear Porter’s pseudonym.
In 1952, a film featuring five stories, called O. Henry’s Full House, was made. The episode
garnering the most critical acclaim was “The Cop and the Anthem” starring Charles Laughton
and Marilyn Monroe. The other stories are “The Clarion Call”, “The Last Leaf”, “The Ransom
of Red Chief” (starring Fred Allen and Oscar Levant), and “The Gift of the Magi”.

The O. Henry House and O. Henry Hall, both in Austin, Texas, are named for him. O. Henry
Hall, now owned by the University of Texas, previously served as the federal courthouse in
which O. Henry was convicted of embezzlement.
Porter has elementary schools named for him in Greensboro, North Carolina (William Sydney
Porter Elementary and Garland, Texas (O. Henry Elementary), as well as a middle school in
Austin, Texas (O. Henry Middle School. The O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro is also named after
Porter.

6.2 After Twenty Years

The policeman on the beat moved up the avenue impressively. The impressiveness was habitual
and not for show, for spectators were few. The time was barely 10 o’clock at night, but chilly
gusts of wind with a taste of rain cigar in them had well nigh depeopled the streets. Trying
doors as he went, twirling his club with many intricate and artful movements, turning now
and then to cast his watchful eye down the pacific thoroughfare, the officer, with his stalwart

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