Happy birthday to William Sydney Porter, who founded the magazine the Rolling Stone, coined the term banana Republic, and wrote what is the most perfect example of the short story craft I know of before Kurt Vonnegut. Porter had worked at the First National Bank of Austin as a teller and bookkeeper. The bank was operated informally and Porter was apparently careless in keeping his books and may have embezzled funds. In 1894, he was accused by the bank of embezzlement and lost his job but was not indicted. He then worked full-time on his humorous weekly called The Rolling Stone, which he started while working at the bank. The Rolling Stone featured satire on life, people and politics and included Porters short stories and sketches. When the First National Bank of Austin was audited by federal auditors and they found the embezzlement shortages that had led to his firing. A federal indictment followed and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement. On impulse, he skipped bail and fled to Honduras, with which the United States had no extradition treaty. While holed up in a Trujillo hotel for several months, he wrote Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term banana republic to describe the country. Hearing his wife was dying, Porter returned to Austin and surrendered to the court, pending an appeal. Having little to say in his own defense, he was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in prison. While in prison, Porter, as a licensed pharmacist, worked in the prison hospital as the night druggist. Porter was given his own room in the hospital wing, and there is no record that he actually spent time in the cell block of the prison. A friend of his in New Orleans would forward his stories to publishers, so they had no idea the writer was imprisoned. Porter was released on this day, July 24, in 1901, for good behavior after serving three years. (A good day!) He had fourteen stories published under various pseudonyms while he was in prison, but was becoming best known as O. Henry, a pseudonym that first appeared over the story Whistling Dicks Christmas Stocking in the December 1899 issue of McClures Magazine. Porter gave various explanations for the origin of his pen name. In 1909 he gave an interview to The New York Times, in which he gave an account of it: It was during these New Orleans days that I adopted my pen name of O. Henry. I said to a friend: Im going to send out some stuff. I dont know if it amounts to much, so I want to get a literary alias. Help me pick out a good one. Having decided the name Henry would do for a last name, he wanted something short for the first name. His friend said Why don’t you use a plain initial letter, then? asked the friend. Good, said I, O is about the easiest letter written, and O it is. In the introduction to The World of O. Henry: Roads of Destiny and Other Stories tho, William Trevor writes that when Porter was in the Ohio State Penitentiary there was a prison guard named Orrin Henry, whom William Sydney Porter . . . immortalised as O. Henry. This is nice. His second anthology, The Four Million, opens with a reference to Ward McAllisters assertion that there were only Four Hundred people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen—the census taker—and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the Four Million. To O. Henry, everyone in New York counted. He had an obvious affection for the city, which he called Bagdad-on-the-Subway, and many of his stories are set there. Methinx there are seven billion stories on the Blue Marble! youtube/watch?v=o2VFgHGKzx4
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 21:17:30 +0000
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