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O. Henry’s real name was William Sidney (Sydney) Porter. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1862, of mixed Quaker (Connecticut) and Southern (Virginia) ancestry. His mother, a woman of remarkable strength of character and some literary talent, died in 1865, and O. Henry’s rearing was entrusted to his paternal grandmother. His father was a physician, but apparently a business failure at everything he attempted. What schooling O. Henry had was received in the little private school of an aunt, Miss Lina Porter. From early boyhood he worked in the drug store of an uncle, and long before he was twenty he was a registered pharmacist.

In 1882O. Henry left for Texas to seek a dryer climate. It was feared that he was developing consumption. He settled on the Hall ranch in La Salle County, almost half way between San Antonio and the Mexican border. He spent two years on the ranch and in 1884 went to Austin. During his first three years there, he lived as practically an adopted son in the home of Mr.Joe Harrell, who was also a native of Greensboro. He worked at various “jobs”—cigar-store clerk, pharmacist, etc.

In 1887O. Henry secured a position in the State Land Office as assistant compiling draftsman. Here he remained for four years—the happiest ones, it seems, in his life. The position meant to him prosperity; and five months after he had begun his work, he was married to Miss Athol Estes, the daughter of Mrs.G. P. Roach. There was a romantic elopement, a family reconciliation, and what O. Henry called “a settling down to a comedy of happiness ever afterwards.”

It was shortly after he took up his work in the Land Office that O. Henry first marketed his writings. The amount received for a “string of jokes and sketches” accepted by the Detroit Free Press was small, but it was to increase steadily, even during the most troublous period of his life. As a boy in Greensboro he was known for his drawings and cartoons, and while on the ranch in Texas he drew some pictures and also wrote to his relatives and friends in North Carolina letters indicative of his later literary style.

A change in the State administration in 1891 meant that O. Henry’s position in the Land Office was lost. He became connected with the First National Bank of Austin as paying and receiving teller, where he was to work until December, 1894. Before giving up his position in the bank, he had undertaken the publication of a humorous, semi-political weekly, The Rolling Stone, published at Austin and later simultaneously in Austin and San Antonio. After he left the bank, he had to depend on The Rolling Stone for all his income, but without capital he could not make of it a financial success. It existed only a year, from April 28, 1894, to April 27, 1895. Almost six months passed before O. Henry left Austin to become a staff contributor to the Houston Daily Post. His first work appeared in the Post on October 19, 1895.

It was shortly after this date that an ominous shadow settled over O. Henry’s head. In February of 1896 the Federal Grand Jury at Austin brought an indictment against W. S. Porter, charging the embezzlement of funds while he was acting as paying and receiving teller of the First National Bank of Austin. Finally, summoned to trial in July, 1896, O. Henry left Houston to answer the charge; but he only got as far as Hempstead. There it was necessary to change trains; but instead of taking the train for Austin, he returned to Houston and then went on to New Orleans. When next heard from, he was in Honduras. In January, 1897, after six month’s absence O. Henry received news of the serious illness of his wife. He set out to join her immediately and reached Austin by February 5, 1897. He at once reported to the civil authorities. His bondsmen had not been assessed, and he was allowed to go free but with his bond doubled.

His wife died of tuberculosis the following July, and in February, 1898, O. Henry’ case came to trial. He plead not guilty, but for some unknown reason he maintained an utter indifference throughout the trial. On March 25 he was sentenced to imprisonment in the Federal Ward of the Ohio State Penitentiary. On account of good behavior, however, O. Henry’s term in prison was shortened to a little over three years. On July 24, 1901, he again became a free man. His ability as a pharmacist gave him the opportunity to work in prison at something comparatively easy. But what is of most interest to us in regard to his life there is that by the time he got out of confinement he was pretty well known, under the pseudonym of O. Henry by editors of a number of America’s most popular magazines.

As soon as he was out of prison O. Henry went to join his daughter and the Roaches, who were then living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He now devoted all his energies to writing, and in the spring of 1902 he was called to New York. The eight years that O. Henry spent in the great metropolis were marked by an astonishing fecundity in literary production and an ever increasing fame as the writer of a peculiar type of short story, now known universally as the “O. Henry short story.”

O. Henry died in New York City on June 5, 1910, and was buried in Asheville, North Carolina. The only other event of his life which should be recorded here is his marriage in 1907 to Miss Sara Coleman, a sweetheart of his North Carolina days, and author of Wind of Destiny in which appear many letters written to her by O. Henry just before their marriage.

Practically the whole body of O. Henry’s stories and sketches first appeared in periodicals. Doubleday, Page&Company (now Doubleday, Doran and Company) have put into book form almost everything he wrote, and the volumes in the order of their publication are as follows: Cabbages and Kings, 1904; The Four Million, 1906; The Trimmed Lamp and Heart of the West, 1907; The Voice of the City and The Gentle Grafter, 1908; Roads of Destiny and Options, 1909; Strictly Business and Whirligigs, 1910; Sixes and Sevens, 1911; Rolling Stones, 1913; Waifs and Strays, 1917. In 1923 Harper and Brothers brought out Postscripts by O. Henry, edited by Florence Stratton.

The title of Rolling Stones, invented by Harry Peyton Steger, is based on the weekly, The Rolling Stone, published by O. Henry in Texas in 1894 and 1895. It contains odds and ends; some stories written when O. Henry was at his best, “The Fog in Santone,” for example; material used in the original The Rolling Stone; excerpts from the Postscripts column written for the Houston Post; and a few letters. Postscripts by O. Henry, as the name suggests, contains material taken from Will Porter’s Houston Post column. The Four Million is based on New York life, and The Trimmed Lamp, The Voice of the City, and Strictly Business are simply “more stories of the four million.” Heart of the West is made up exclusively of western stories. Cabbages and Kings, a composite of several individual stories separately published and now woven together, depicts life as O. Henry saw it in Honduras, Central America. The Gentle Grafter is supposedly based upon stories which O. Henry heard his fellow prisoners relate in the Ohio Penitentiary. The other volumes are made up of stories varied in character—New York, Texas, and tropical America.

Just as every other great artist has done, O. Henry has set an example. He invented a short-story technique of his own, and the most discriminating critics have studied that technique and pronounced it good. He owed no more to the “unity of impression idea” of Poe than to the stringy structure of the medieval Patient Griselda. Almost by chance, it seems, he hit upon the trick of concentration of attention, economy of words, rising suspense, and dénouement of climax and surprise; and in that trick lies his art.

There was in O. Henry, however, a power greater than his art. That was his genius for observation. Art without ideas profits nothing. O. Henry got his ideas by seeing everything about him, by always keeping on the qui vive, as he himself said, for “the man around the corner.” Fate dealt him a life of manifold experiences, and from every experience his store of observations increased. After all, his works are no more than an artistic record of life as he saw it.

The stories that make up the present volume have for forty years remained unnoticed in the files of the Houston Post. The general belief that O. Henry was simply a columnist on the Post is probably the reason for their being overlooked. The idea that his column appeared regularly has, furthermore, tended to dismiss the question of what sort of work he really did on the paper. When I examined the files of the Post, I was surprised to find that the column “Some Postscripts” was often missing. In February, 1896, it came out only four times, in April seven, in June three. In spite of this irregularity Will Porter’s salary had gradually been raised from $15 to $25 a week.

Here is a situation which has only one logical explanation. O. Henry must have done other work in order to draw this steadily increasing weekly salary. A close examination of the Houston Post files from October 19, 1895, to June 22, 1896, reveals a mass of material, heretofore unidentified, as unmistakably the work of Will Porter.

What first attracts the eye is the abundance of unsigned comic drawings and clever cartoons. The style of these drawings is unquestionably O. Henry’s. We know from various sources that he was constantly drawing pictures, and we have a positive statement from Colonel R. M. Johnston, under whom Will Porter worked on the Houston Post, that his ability to draw cartoons was called into requisition soon after he joined the staff of the Post. Some of the best of these cartoons depict the political situation of the time. Others are entirely independent of politics and point to the development of the present-day comic strips in all newspapers. Sometimes they portray character traits and are accompanied by rhymed quips. At other times they are used to illustrate lengthy stories. These stories, of course, were composed by Will Porter, and from them the selections for this volume have been made.

The word-usage, sentence-structure, mythological allusion, plot-manipulation, character types, and central ideas that characterize O. Henry’s short stories generally, are also plainly recognizable in these selections from the Houston Post. For example, “A Tragedy” not only turns on a pun, as O. Henry’s stories often do, but is based upon the story of The Arabian Nights, which later colored O. Henry’s whole conception of New York City, Little-Old-Bagdad-on-the-Subway. The central idea of “An Odd Character,” the story of a tramp who claims to be 241 years old, appeared later in “The Enchanted Kiss” and “Door of Unrest.”

The characters of these earlier stories—shop-girls, Irish policemen, crooks, tramps, sheep-men, cowmen, drunkards, pharmacists, doctors, newspaper reporters, dudes—are practically identical with many of those used in later O. Henry stories.

Likewise, O. Henry’s propensity for the use of the “envelope structure,” the sort provided by the pilgrimage in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and “narrated development,” or the telling of the story by one of the characters, is very much in evidence in these Houston Post stories, as in a number of his later acknowledged works. For example, in “The Mirage on the Frio” a sheep-man from La Salle County tells his story to a group of men on a Buffalo Bayou fishing party; and later in Cabbages and Kings the story of “The Shamrock and the Palm” is told by the Irishman Clancy to a group of fellow Caucasians who have met at the end of a tropical day.

A large amount of internal evidence, moreover, points emphatically to O. Henry as the author of these pieces. They have the unmistakable stylistic qualities, the humorous point of view, the unexpected climaxes of O. Henry, After a careful and detailed study of every single piece of the material here reproduced, along with the application of various stylistic tests, I was thoroughly convinced of the authenticity of its authorship. In order to support my own convictions, however, I consulted experts who have been students of O. Henry for years. Dr.L. W. Payne, Jr., of The University of Texas, Dr.Vernon Loggins, of Columbia University, and Dr.Dorothy Scarborough, also of Columbia and compiler of many books of short stories, examined photostatic copies which I had made of the material. They are unanimous in the opinion that the authorship of both the drawings with their legends and the articles and stories may be safely attributed to O. Henry’s pen.

The nature of the material included in this volume determined the arrangement of the book into three parts. The stories in the first part show that Will Porter had already discovered the technique that made him famous as O. Henry. The sketches in the second part show O. Henry at work-gathering story material from his observations of life. Will Porter’s ventures into the realm of newspaper poetry, I have included in order to illustrate the principles set forth in his article “Newspaper Poets,” also reprinted here. As far as I know, this article is the only bit of serious literary criticism ever written by O. Henry. It is noteworthy also as the only article in the Houston Post which was ever signed in full by “W. S. Porter.” A more detailed treatment of this and allied topics concerning O. Henry’s life in Texas may be found in my O. Henry in Texas, designed as a companion volume to the present book.