Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,747

This is the grave of William Porter, better known as O.Henry.

Born in 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Porter grew up middle class, the son of a physician. However, his mother died in childbirth when he was 3 years old. So his paternal grandmother took on the mothering role, as his father moved in with her. She encouraged his reading and he was voracious. He went to local schools, with extra tutoring from an aunt, until he was 15. Then he worked to become a pharmacist, starting with his uncle’s store in Greensboro, and by the time he was 19, he got a pharmacist license. I’m not sure what standards one had to meet to get such a thing in 1881; given what I know about late 19th century medicine, not much.

Now, Porter was a bit sickly. He had developed a real nasty cough that would not go away. Of course he feared it was tuberculosis. It doesn’t seem to have been. But he was nervous about that. So he went to Texas. There, he started to sow what became a lifetime of wild oats. He worked on a ranch for a bit, but then started working as a pharmacist in Austin, while both writing his own stories and also being a huge party animal. He was a good musician who played the guitar and mandolin and was a part of a singing quartet who one hired for parties and who would go around and sing at women out and about at night, which probably annoyed many of them. While there, he met a sickly young girl named Athol Estes. She already had tuberculosis. They met at the laying of the cornerstone for the next Texas state capitol building, and what bad has ever taken place there? Her mother objected to the relationship, but she couldn’t really stop it and they got married in 1887.

They stayed in Austin and Porter got a job at with the General Land Office, working as a draftsman drawing up the maps from the survey data. He also started publishing his stories. These were mostly in little magazines, but then he started his own publication. The Rolling Stone didn’t last a long time, only about a year before closing, but it did have a subscription base of 1,500 at its peak and people liked Porter’s stories, which were broadly humorous, often based on people he knew in Austin.

Porter than went to work at a bank and this is where things got super sketchy. Did he embezzle money? He was fired for that in 1894, but it might have just been sloppy bookkeeping. Porter was also an unrestrained drunk and that might have been part of it too. Or he did steal the money, but if he did, he wasn’t exactly getting rich off it. In any case, his stories got attention from a newspaper in Houston, who invited him to write for it. He and his family moved there and when federal auditors did an audit on that bank in Austin, they charged Porter with embezzlement.

Porter freaked out. The day before he trial started, he bailed for Latin America. He sent his wife and daughter back to live with her parents. He ended up on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, because that nation had no extradition treaty with the U.S. He lived a pretty dissolute life there, becoming best friends with a notorious train robber and I am sure they drank their lives away. This also allowed Porter to see the operations of American fruit companies up close. He was disgusted and it was he at this time who came up with the term “banana republic” to succinctly describe the real political power structure of Honduras–the government ruled with the consent of the fruit companies.

But Porter came back. His wife was finally dying of her tuberculosis. He wanted to see her again. He returned to Austin in February 1897 and whether because the courts were slow or they were nice or he used his connections to get the trial delayed, he was able to take care of her until she died in July 1897. Then he went on trial, said nothing in his own defense, and received a 5-year prison sentence at a penitentiary in Ohio. He was able to use his pharmacy license there and worked in the prison pharmacy, which gave him some privileges and made his time there less hellish than it could have been. In fact, he had his own room in the hospital and evidently never had to spend time literally behind bars.

The time Porter spent in prison also gave him space to take his writing seriously. He started publishing under pseudonyms but increasingly used “O. Henry.” He was first published under that name in McClure’s, in 1899, with “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking.” One reason he used the pseudonyms is he figured he couldn’t get published if people knew he was in prison. A friend of his was the conduit between him and the magazines.

In 1901, Porter was released early and he moved to Pittsburgh to take care of his daughter, living with her grandparents. He now introduced himself to his publishers and by 1902 was in New York to be near them. He wrote like a beast, publishing 381 stories over the next several years. Wasn’t a novel guy. Not sure he ever he tried to write one. He published a story in New York World Sunday Magazine each week for over a year. He did well and made a good living, becoming extremely popular. He remarried, in fact it was a childhood sweetheart reunion thing.

As O. Henry, Porter had a bit of what we might today call a Tom Waits thing. He loved New York because he loved the down and out characters and hanging out with them. Many of his stories are about people of the street, criminals, outcasts, sometimes cops or waitresses. He was a master of the early 20th century naturalism popular in the U.S. and Europe. “The Gift of the Magi” is probably his most famous story, but there are really so many.

But Porter couldn’t get past his own demons. The bottle was his best friend. By 1908, his second wife had left him and the quality of his stories turned to mush as he drank more. The end came in 1910, from cirrhosis and all the other related issues that come with it. He was 47 years old.

O.Henry is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina.

The Library of America published a volume of 100 O.Henry stories as Volume 345. If you would like this series to visit other authors in the Library of America, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Elizabeth Spencer, at Volume 344, is in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Virginia Hamilton, at Volume 348 is in Yellow Springs, Ohio. As an aside, I think the LOA has gotten more interesting in recent years as it ran out of iconic classic American authors and finally published every damn thing Henry James ever wrote that no one wants to read and had to move on to other authors. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.