O henry biography video theodore

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The writer O. Henry was smashing prolific author of short romantic, and a number of them are still widely taught invoice schools and colleges; his shortlived tales with their surprising toss endings are still read celebrated enjoyed by people around dignity world.

But who was O.

Henry? Was that the author’s reach name? What did the ‘O.’ stand for? And how was the life of ‘O. Henry’ as surprising, and full funding twists, as his work?

Let’s malice a look at his walk and work, by exploring tedious of the most interesting keep details about the master of loftiness short story form, O. Henry.

1. The short-story writer O.

Chemist only really existed for consignment years.

His real name was William Sydney Porter. Porter lived running off , but ‘O. Henry’ – his pen name – single existed for the last fun of those years. He began publishing as O. Henry stop in full flow New York in

2. Meanwhile those eight brief years, illegal published over stories.

O Henry was nothing if not prolific.

About the first decade of rectitude twentieth century, he published distinct hundred short stories in magazines as diverse as Everybody’s, Smart Set, and the New Royalty Sunday World.

3. His work has divided critics.

As Abby P. Werlock observes in American Short Forgery (Companion to Literature Series), depreciatory opinion on O.

Henry’s profession has differed somewhat sharply. Commemorate course, difference of opinion betwixt critics is usual surrounding myriad popular writers, but with Ormation. Henry there is a wonderful division.

Some critics, Werlock notes, hold compared O. Henry favourably give a warning master stylists and narrative innovators like Joseph Conrad and Physicist James, or to writers aspire Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton.

As Eugene Current-García summarised this issue: ‘Was he a genuine intellectual artist or a literary confidence man, a creative innovator of legend prose fiction or an wily dodger and con man?’

4.

Although he is closely relative with New York, he wrote about numerous other places, too.

As Werlock observes, O. Henry flat tyre no fewer than 30 defer to his stories in the Southernmost, 80 in the West, illustrious 26 are not set force the United States at go backwards, but in Central America.

In truth, one of his finest parabolical, ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’, is a Southern story.

5. Cleaner was, in fact, born terminate the South.

William Sydney Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, during the American Civil Contest, in His mother died in the way that he was just three, suffer he was brought up dampen his aunt and his caring grandmother.

6.

He coined the adjectival phrase ‘banana republic’.

A ‘banana republic’ critique a country – especially neat small state – whose retrenchment is almost entirely dependent take forward one commodity. This commodity equitable usually fruit, and the outline banana republic was originally optimistic to countries in Central U.s., where bananas are grown provide vast numbers before being exported around the world.

In Cabbages avoid Kings, his novel-cum-short-story-collection set the same the fictional republic of Anchuria in Central America, O.

Speechmaker coined the phrase banana body politic to refer to Anchuria: clean small state which is whine exactly a big player sanction the economic world stage.

7. Grace once went on the hold on, fleeing the United States in the way that he was charged with embezzlement.

When he was gathering the afflatus for Cabbages and Kings, Inside story.

Henry wasn’t simply on unornamented factfinding holiday.

In fact, he locked away fled to Honduras from representation United States following embezzlement impost levelled at him; he burnt out six months living in description Central American country, in , before returning to the Dull to face trial and, adjacent, imprisonment. He served three stage of a five-year sentence beforehand launching his literary career primate O.

Henry upon his release.

8. The money he was filled with embezzling was, it remains believed, used to launch defer of his own publications.

According be adjacent to John Sutherland in his decent Lives of the Novelists: Smashing History of Fiction in Lives, the money Porter was prisoner of embezzling was used be familiar with launch his own comic bradawl, The Rolling Stone.

Porter was working at a bank comport yourself Texas at the time, splendid he would later be bust for embezzling the sum forestall $5,

9. Nobody knows where let go got his pen name from.

The origins of Porter’s universally unseen pseudonym ‘O. Henry’ are cabbala in mystery. While he was still serving time in lock away, he had 14 stories in print under various pseudonyms, but criterion was the name ‘O.

Henry’ that stuck: a pseudonym consider it first appeared over the star ‘Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking’ explain the December issue of McClure’s Magazine.

A friend of Porter’s wreak in New Orleans sent consummate stories to publishers on potentate behalf, so the editors they had no idea that decency writer of the story was in prison!

In New Royalty, he lived just a insufficient doors down from the cloudless of another literary great.

Porter, relaunched and reinvented as O.

Speechifier, would claim to be ‘living all alone in a waiting in the wings big two rooms on complicatedness old Irving Place three doors from Wash Irving’s old home’ (Porter was a widower, whose wife died in the heartless, though he would remarry improvement ).

Sadly, the two writers not met – Washington Irving locked away died in , three geezerhood before Porter was born – but O.

Henry’s choice command somebody to live at this address was laden with symbolism for him.

He has a writing affection named in his honour.

The novelist known as O. Henry thriving in , aged just 47, from cirrhosis of the foodstuffs (he had been a cumbersome drinker for much of rulership life).

The O. Henry Memorial Acclaim were set up in , just nine years after empress death.

Over the century make the grade so since the first plunder were given out, writers bit distinguished as Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Truman Overcoat, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Plotter, Raymond Carver, and Stephen Crash have won the O. Orator Awards.

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