The Fall and Second Act of O. Henry

O. Henry is remembered by millions as America’s unparalleled maven of the short story. His stories were pithy, comprehensible, and moving, and there were hundreds of them. A brilliant force of nature, he could produce a pearl of a story in a single night and hardly ever corrected his work from the initial handwritten manuscript. If there ever was someone who seemed to possess an innate talent for putting into words the dreams, desires, and motivations of ordinary people, it was him.
At age 20, he drifted to the rapidly industrializing West and, after settling in Texas, held a series of jobs, including working on a friend’s ranch, bookkeeping in a real estate office, and in a pharmacy. There are an epic number of stories floating around about Porter’s whereabouts and travels at that time and a fair share of them are most likely apocryphal. Indeed, from brazen cattle thief to miner and cowboy, to weary traveler and wandering tintype artist, the tales and legends attached to him are many.
“A lot of yarns,” he was once quoted in the Houston Daily Post as saying, “have been printed about me and none of them is true.”
What is known is that Porter moved to Austin in 1884, population of over 11,000, and worked a variety of odd jobs before finding work as a draftsman with the General Land Office.
Subsequently, he married Athol Estes Roach and found employment as a teller in a bank in Austin, where he was said to be kindly regarded by his customers and co-workers. Around that time, he became a columnist for a Houston newspaper and ran a weekly newspaper in Austin called The Rolling Stone, a comic and humor journal. He whittled away his free nights writing stories.
Porter was a model prisoner: he worked long, overnight hours as the prison drug clerk and was secretary to the prison steward. He drew from his life and prison experiences, and, from a heart-piercing place of fresh insight, he learned from them. He befriended fellow inmates and based some of the characters and plots of his stories on their true-to-life accounts.
It would not be too much of a stretch to say that Porter rejoiced in the inward journey of writing and found some degree of refuge and repentance in it. One can only speculate how redemptive it must have felt to him when, as his new alter ego O. Henry, he sold his first story “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking” to the national magazine McClure’s Magazine, in December of 1899.
Porter was blessed with an early release, serving only three years and three months out of his five-year sentence. He had sold about a dozen stories and earned a few hundred dollars from them, which was enough money for him to eventually travel east to New York City after he was freed on July 24, 1901. There, Porter earnestly committed himself to writing; drawing from a seemingly endless fount of lucid and compelling ideas, he mastered the short story form.
Supernaturally prolific, he penned, by some estimates, more than 600 short stories, including one of the most endearing Christmas stories ever written, “The Gift of the Magi,” and “The Last Leaf,” a thought-provoking reflection on the inherent symbiosis of death and life, told through metaphors of old ivy leaves and the regenerative pursuit of art.
The author known as O. Henry died June 5, 1910, in New York City, the conclusion of a remarkably successful and unique journey. Outside of the smartness and aptitude of words, William Sidney Porter profoundly exemplified the truism that, indeed, there are second acts in American lives, and that America gives second chances, and is especially generous to those who accept them with care.