Reading. Term 1, form 9

O.Henry

One day when the century was young O.Henry was dining with several friends at a New York restaurant favoured by theatrical and writing folk. Eager to learn how O.Henry wrote, the friends began asking him where he found his plots. "oh, everywhere," replied O.Henry. "There are stories in everything." He picked up the bill of fare, on which the dishes of the day were typewritten. "There's a storybin this," he said/ And then he outlined substantially the tale called "Springtime a la Carte."

O.Henry was born William Sydney porter, in Greensboro, North Carolina, September II, 1862. Bill's mother had died when he was three. His education stopped at fifteen, but his aunt, who had a private school, stimulated his reading and storytelling. Bill Porter worked five years in his uncle's drugstore.

In 1884 O.Henry went to Austin,where he married. In Austin he obtained a job as a teller in a bank. When irregularities were found in Porter's accounts, a shortage of less than a thousand dollars, he was found guilty and sent into the prison In the prison he worked as a drug clerk, and there he began seriously to write. It was there also that he supposed to have picked up the name O.Henry from a prison guard name Orrin Henry, though Porter never gave a clear explanation of its origin.

After the prison O.Henry lived in a shabby bedroomi n Pittsburg for three months. In 1902 he moved to New York. What followed is a fabulous story of success. In less than eight years O.Henry became the most widely read storyteller in the country.

In Cabbages and Kings (1904) appeared his stories about Central America. In his second book, The Four Million, he collected stories about New York. Other tales appeared in the Trimmed Lamp (1907), Heart of the West (1907), The Voice of the City (1908), Roads of Destiny (1909), Options (1909), Strictly Business (1910), Whirligigs (1910, and in three books issued after his death.

O.Henry died in 1910 at the age of forty-seven. Like Edgar Allan Poe, O.Henry is now one of the legendary characters of New York. He was a kindly, considerable man, who liked to walk about the city at night, studying faces and inventing stories about them. "I've got some of my best yarns of my benches, lampposts and newspaper stands," he said. That was O.Henry's way, to seize on something commonplace, part of the routine of living, and associate it with one of his favourite subjects, the experience of two lovers, kept apart in the maze of a great city, united by a providential accident - and a trick of story-telling.

O.Henry is a master of make-believe, who puts a romantic glow over everyday living. By drawing characters who are wistful when lucky and brave in adversity, he answers the eternal demand for a good story.