O. Henry: The Greensboro Boy, the Texas Prison, and the Gift of the Magi

William Sydney Porter was born in Greensboro on September eleventh, eighteen sixty-two, the middle child of a physician who spent most of his time building a perpetual motion machine in the backyard. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was three. His grandmother and his Aunt Lina raised him. Aunt Lina taught him privately for nine years, and she taught him to read widely and draw well and notice everything. Porter apprenticed at a Greensboro pharmacy beginning in eighteen seventy-nine. In eighteen eighty-two, at nineteen, he left for Texas.

In Texas he worked a ranch, then a land office, then a bank. The bank part went wrong. In eighteen ninety-five he was indicted for embezzlement of funds from the First National Bank of Austin. Whether he actually took the money, and why, has been debated ever since. He fled to Honduras, returned when his wife was dying, was convicted, and served three years of a five-year sentence in the Ohio Penitentiary, a state prison in Columbus, Ohio.

He began writing stories in prison, submitting them to magazines under a pen name so that his incarceration would not follow the work. He settled on O. Henry, a name he had picked up from a bar conversation in New Orleans. After his release he moved to New York, where he wrote prolifically, producing more than three hundred short stories in a decade.

His most famous story, The Gift of the Magi, was published in nineteen oh-five. A husband sells his watch to buy his wife combs for her hair. His wife cuts her hair to sell it to buy him a watch chain. Both gifts are rendered useless. Both gifts are acts of love. The twist ending that made O. Henry famous was itself a gift, a way of reminding the reader that the story is never quite the one you thought you were reading.