HENRY AND HIS WRITINGS
William Sidney Porter, otherwise known as “O. Henry,” was born in 1867, in Greensboro, N. C.—the descendant of several governors of that state, it may be remarked in passing. While still very young he went to Texas and received his education at an academy there. Because of poor health he was unable to attend college, so he spent two and a half years of his early manhood on a cattle ranch. Following that period came his journalistic work on the Houston Post, and a little ten-page weekly story-paper of his own, The Iconoclast—afterwards renamed The Rolling Stone—most of the stories for which he wrote himself. After several years in Houston, he visited Central America with a friend—a trip which, later, yielded rich material for his first book. Then followed a short period as a drug clerk in Austin, Texas. Next we see him in New Orleans, again embarked upon literary work; and there it was that he first showed real promise as a short-story writer, and there also that he adopted his unique pseudonym—the surname of which was selected at random from a newspaper account of a social function, and the initial letter because it was the “easiest letter written.” About eight years before his death he came to New York, in response to an offer from one of the magazine editors there, and after that his name became well-known and his success assured. He died in New York City, June 5, 1910, at the age of forty-two. His three earliest books are perhaps the ones by which he is best known; Cabbages and Kings, The Four Million, and The Trimmed Lamp. Eleven volumes of short-stories comprise his literary output. The later stories do not enhance his reputation, though some of them are in his best vein—notably “The Ransom of Red Chief,” contained in the volume Whirligigs, published the year of his death. His last book, Sixes and Sevens, was issued posthumously, in 1911.
Of all short-story writers O. Henry was easily first as a master of surprise. The sudden and often astounding reversals at the end of his stories became delightfully characteristic, and the reader with the O. Henry habit played a happy though always losing game with himself in trying to forecast the denouement of each new story. Sometimes the yarn-spinner would delight in leading us to curl our lip, and say, “Pshaw, O. Henry is employing a rather old device—in fact, this is quite trite—” and then all in an instant the sly phrase would peep forth to show that we had been caught from ambush; for O. Henry had scant reverence for the reader’s dignity—he poked fun at him as laughingly as could Shakespeare himself, on occasion.
No other writer ever made slang so really funny, yet few knew better the richness of serious English diction for really literary ends. Not that he embellished his sentences, but that he appraised every word at its true value before uttering it as literary coin. When he said that one of his characters was “denounced by the name of——” (I have forgotten what), he extracted the full essence from those six words, and that is art.
Other short-story writers have been as trenchant in wit, others as keen in observation, but none has known so wide a variety of common-folk as O. Henry. Four great types he understood with rare completeness: the Texan (Heart of the West), the Central American (Cabbages and Kings), the middle-and lower-class New Yorker (The Four Million),—and Everybody Else (all of his eleven books of short-stories).
O. Henry’s advice to young writers as to the secret of short-story writing is well known. “There are two rules,” he said. “The first rule is to write stories that please yourself. There is no second rule.” He was once facetiously asked if there were a second rule, what that rule would be. “Sell the story,” he answered.—G. J. Nathan, O. Henry in His Own Bagdad. The Bookman, vol. 31.
O. Henry has often been called “the Yankee Maupassant,” and up to a certain point the characterization is suggestive. His stories have the swiftness and point of the anecdote, as Maupassant’s have. He employs just enough art to keep alive the reader’s interest for the laugh or the gasp to which everything else leads up.... As a humorist he was American to the finger tips. That is to say, he secured his effects by over-statement, which is the salient characteristic of American humor.... Mark Twain was a world humorist; O. Henry was an American humorist.—A Typically American Short-Story Writer (Current Literature, vol. 49).
The author seems to know almost every type of man—the rich and portly financier, the “fly” newsboy or district messenger, the denizens of the great hotels, the “salesladies,” the chorus girls, the women in the shop, the raffish hangers-on of the saloons, the gamblers, and the grafters.... Mr. Porter is a real flâneur of the American type, only, he confines himself to no boulevard, to no city, to no state, nor even to a single country. The world, in fact, is his oyster, and he has learned almost unconsciously to open it and to extract from it alike the meat and the salty juices.... He gets down to the very heart of things. He sees the humour and the pathos blended; yet, on the whole, he is an optimist ... who believes that in every human being there is to be found something good, however mixed it may be with other qualities; and, like a true American, he can see and chuckle at the humour of it all.—Harry Thurston Peck, Some Representative American Story-Tellers, The Bookman, vol. 31.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON O. HENRY