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Elective English–II

Notes after spending three years in jail. Porter reunited with his daughter Margaret, now age 11, in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Athol’s parents had moved after Porter’s conviction. Margaret
was never told that her father had been in prison—just that he had been away on business.
Porter’s most prolific writing period started in 1902, when he moved to New York City to be
near his publishers. While there, he wrote 381 short stories. He wrote a story a week for over
a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine. His wit, characterization, and plot twists
were adored by his readers, but often panned by critics. Porter married again in 1907, to
childhood sweetheart Sarah (Sallie) Lindsey Coleman, whom he met again after revisiting his
native state of North Carolina.
Porter was a heavy drinker, and his health deteriorated markedly in 1908, which affected his
writing. In 1909, Sarah left him, and he died on June 5, 1910, of cirrhosis of liver, complications
of diabetes, and an enlarged heart. After funeral services in New York City, he was buried in
the Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina. His daughter, Margaret Worth Porter,
who died in 1927, was buried next to her father.
Portrait of Porter from frontispiece in his collection of short stories Waifs and Strays. O.
Henry’s stories frequently have surprise endings. In his days, he was called the American
answer to Guy de Maupassant. Both authors wrote plot twist endings, but O. Henry’s stories
were much more playful. His stories are also known for witty narration.
Most of O. Henry’s stories are set in his own time, the early 20th century. Many take place in
New York City and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses,
etc.

O. Henry’s work is wide-ranging, and his characters can be found roaming the cattle-lands of
Texas, exploring the art of the con-man, or investigating the tensions of class and wealth in
turn-of-the-century New York. O. Henry had an inimitable hand for isolating some element of
society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of language. Some of his best
and least-known work is contained in Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories each of which
explores some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town, while
advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another.
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 too much, so I want to get a literary alias. Help me pick out
a good one.” He suggested that we got a newspaper and picked 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. They 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.”

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