41 Stories by O. Henry

O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter, was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1862. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was three; his father, a doctor, became an alcoholic and tried to invent a perpetual motion machine. Educated in a small school run by his aunt, young Porter went to work in a drugstore at fifteen. Later he traveled to Texas to work on a ranch (he too was showing symptoms of tuberculosis), and spent ten years in Austin, Texas, where he married, worked as a bank teller, and purchased a weekly newspaper, The Rolling Stone. But the paper failed, and in 1894 Porter was accused of embezzling bank funds. Eventually he fled to Honduras and returned only in 1897 to be with his dying wife. Committed to a federal penitentiary in Ohio, he began writing under the name O. Henry. Following his release in 1901, he lived in New York City, his beloved "Baghdad-on-the-Subway." A prolific writer, often turning out a story a week, he kept his real identity a secret as his fame as O. Henry grew. His first book, Cabbages and Kings, appeared in 1904 and was followed by 13 other collections. His stories have been translated and read all over the world-so popular that they have never gone out of print. But O. Henry, a failure at business, a spendthrift, and finally an alcoholic, died in poverty on June 5, 1910-the final irony of the master of the ironic ending in the short story.Henry, O. is the author of '41 Stories by O. Henry', published 1986 under ISBN 9780451522542 and ISBN 0451522540.