O. Henry's Austin: The Short Story Master Who Fled and Never Came Back

The small white cottage in Brush Square Park in downtown Austin is not where O. Henry was born, or where he died, or where he wrote his most famous stories. But it is the place that made him, and then broke him, and the rupture was so complete that he never returned to Texas for the rest of his life.

William Sydney Porter arrived in Texas in eighteen eighty-two, a twenty-year-old from North Carolina looking for something, and settled in Austin a couple of years later. He found it in stages: ranch work, pharmacy work, drafting work, and eventually a clerkship at the First National Bank of Austin. He also found Athol Estes, whom he married, and a voice. In eighteen ninety-four he launched a weekly humor newspaper called The Rolling Stone, not the magazine you know, but a satirical paper with Austin gossip, drawings, and Porter's emerging wit. It lasted about a year. He could write. He could not make a profit.

In eighteen ninety-three, Porter rented the cottage at Three Oh Seven East Fourth Street, the house you can visit today at the O. Henry Museum, moved one block to preserve it. He lived there with Athol and their daughter Margaret. It was his longest stable address in Austin.

The trouble came from the bank. Audits found discrepancies in his accounts, less than one thousand dollars, later determined by a grand jury to be embezzlement. Porter fled to Honduras before trial, but when word reached him that Athol was dying, he returned. She died in eighteen ninety-seven. He was convicted and sentenced to five years at the federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio.

In prison, to support his daughter and conceal his shame, he wrote short stories under a pen name, O. Henry. The ironic twist endings. The Gift of the Magi. The Last Leaf. After his release he moved to New York, published prolifically, and became one of the most widely read authors in America. He never came back to Texas. The cottage he rented for two years now carries his name.