O.

Henry Outline

I. Early Life
A. Background of parents
a.O. Henry was the son of Algernon Sydney Porter and Mary Jane
Virginia Porter.
[Link] father was a physician, but more interested in perpetual motion.
[Link] mother died when O. Henry was only three years old.
B. Where/When born
a. O. Henry was born as William Sydney Porter at Greensboro, N.C.,
on September 11, 1862.
C. Childhood
a. Almost nothing is known about his childhood.
II. Middle Years
A. Education
a. His parents did not send O. Henry to a school but he was home-
schooled by his aunt. He then left that school with 15 years.
B. Experiences/Influences
a. Without question, her enthusiasm and discipline were the primary
force that aroused Porter’s youthful passion for reading and his
later desire to write.
b. After school he worked for five years in his uncle’s drug store.
III. Adult Life
A. Professions
a. During his three years as a pharmacist’s apprentice, Porter
mastered pharmaceutical techniques sufficiently to earn a state
license as a practicing pharmacist in 1881. Most important for his
future career as a writer, during these drugstore years, he was
meeting people and storing up countless impressions of their
personal oddities, mannerisms, gestures, and modes of speech
which were later to be reflected in his writings.
b. In 1882 he went to Texas for reasons of health, spending two years
on a ranch owned by friends from Greensboro. Here Porter picked
up a little French and German and a good bit of Spanish, an
accomplishment he was to find useful later.
c. Later, when he left for Austin, he spent ten years as clerk and
bookkeeper, draftsman in a state land office, and bank teller. While
he worked as a bank teller he continued writing skits and short
sketches.
B. Marriage
a. On July 5, 1887 he marries nineteen-year-old Athol Estes.
b. His wife was a young woman of wit and high spirits, who is said to
have stimulated and encouraged him in his ambition to become a
writer.
c. After his wife died he married Sara Lindsay Coleman on
November 2, 1907.
C. Children
a. Athol Porter was not physically strong. Her first child, a son born
in 1888, lived but a few hours; her second child, Margaret, in 1889
by only seven years of steadily declining health.
b. O. Henry did not have any children from his second wife.
D. Other Influences
a. Porter was summoned to Austin to stand trial for the embezzlement
of funds from the First National Bank, where he had been teller.
On the way he caught a train in an opposite direction and made his
way to New Orleans.
b. From there he went to Honduras. With two other outlaws he
traveled through South America and Mexico.
c. After he heard of his wife’s health problems he went back to
Austin in 1897.
d. Because of the court’s decision he had to stay in prison for 3 years
and 3 months where he wrote several stories under different pen
names.
E. Literary Career
a. In March 1894 he fulfilled a long-felt aim to publish his skits and
sketches in his own humor paper by buying cheap printing press
and the right to a local scandal sheet, the Iconoclast. Porter
renamed the paper the Rolling Stone. He also contributed verses
and anecdotes.
b. In this ephemeral little paper are to be found the origins of his later
themes, plots, methods, and style.
c. Porter continued developing these talents later in 1895 when he
took a job as a fill-in writer for the Houston Post and soon began
running a daily feature column, “Some Postscripts,” which
resembled the kind of humor he had written for the Rolling Stone.
d. For the Post he also wrote longer sketches, many of them
embryonic foreshadowings of his later, more famous stories.
 e. He also experimented with play writing, collaborating on a musical
comedy based on “He Also Serves,” with two other gentlemen.
The play was staged once, in mid-1909.
f. He also prepared a play based on “The world and the door.
g. At last, he worked for the Pittsburgh Dispatch from 1901 to 1902.
IV. Literary Style
A. Genres
a. Almost all of O. Henry’s literary output is in the short-story form.
b. Also, he wrote skits, sketches and anecdotes for newspapers, like
the Rolling Stone.
B. Major Works (Style/Themes/Subjects)
a. The surprise ending became the hallmark of the O. Henry style,
and the question for the reader was not if there would be a surprise
ending, but just what the surprise would be and how the author
would bring it about. His earlier stories were written with a more
careful finish than he found in demand upon Broadway, but his
falling off in finish was in the interest of a quality which ruled his
art.
b. His method developed chiefly in the direction of greater freedom
for himself behind the raconteur.
c. He is said to have composed many of his stories to the last detail
before writing a word.
d. The themes were mostly about everyday situations and the subjects
he used were people he watched on the street or at work.
C. General Analysis of Author and Works
a. O. Henry was said to be gay, irresponsible, imprudent, hoaxing; no
writer in the language seems clever immediately after one has been
reading O. Henry.
b. Much of his ingenuity is verbal, but it seems almost exhaustless.
As he become more assured of his audience, he kept less out of
sight. For O. Henry, among the fiction writers of his generation,
was the raconteur.
D. Critics’ Opinions of Author and Works
a. Critical analysis of Porter’s stories has often focused on his strong
sense of place and way in which he both portrays the realistic
details and evokes the atmosphere of his chosen setting.
b. The object of his vision was not history or morals, as with
Hawthorne, or the world of dreams, as with Poe, but what he called
adventure.
 c. Criticism has also focused upon Porter’s immense vocabulary and
his acute sensitivity word usage.
V. Summary
A. Details of Death
a. William Sydney Porter, or O. Henry, died of cirrhosis of the liver
on June 5, 1910, in New York City, NY.
B. Influence of Author and Works on American Literature
a. A widely read and published writer, O. Henry’s short stories
influenced not only the development of magazine fiction as a
popular form but also the evolution of modern narrative.
b. Porter’s critical reputation climbed to a dazzling high from
approximately 1910 to 1930, when he became the most popular
short story writer in American Literature, considered the equal of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and other great short-
fiction writers.
c. Porter’s work has been translated into at least twelve languages.
His stories have been widely reprinted, especially in Russia and
France, and have been adopted for radio, stage, and television
performances. O. Henry was, however, extremely popular in the
United States.
d. O. Henry’s contribution to American letters was so obvious that a
long-lived prize – the annual O. Henry Memorial Award for Prize
Stories – was established in 1918 by the New York Society of Arts
and Sciences.