Dec. 31, 2009 - Though he was not born here, he didn't die here and many of his best-known stories are not set here, William S. Porter, better known to generations of readers as O. Henry, was as much a Texan as he was anything else. If he could have stayed out of trouble here, he probably wouldn't have left the state at all. Fleeing the authorities was a time-honored frontier tradition in Texas, and Porter carried on that tradition.
Porter was born and grew up in North Carolina, where he appeared to be settling into the life of a drugstore clerk until he read an advertisement for Texas as a state "growing faster than the sideburns of a thirty-year old."
He was a somewhat sickly young man with a persistent cough -- the clean air and wide open spaces of Texas sounded like a new lease on life. As the saying goes, he wasn't born in Texas, but got here as fast as he could.
Once he got to Texas, Porter might have been one of many over the years who have groused, "There's a lot of things they didn't tell me when I signed on with this outfit."
Working on a ranch in LaSalle County included getting up before sunrise to feed cattle. If he wanted to go town, he had to ride a horse, and once he got to town, there wasn't much more entertainment than there was back at the ranch.
Though his stint on the ranch lasted only a couple of years, he availed himself of the ranch family's well-stocked library and he wrote some of his first short stories at the ranch. Later, ranch and rural Texas life, along with the state's rich trove of legends and lore, informed many of his best known short stories.
When the ranch was sold, Porter moved to Austin and worked in a cigar store and in the general land office. By all accounts, Porter enjoyed himself immensely in Austin. He was a regular at most of the saloons in town and was in demand as a drinking companion because he was an agreeable drunk who preferred telling wild stories to fighting while under the influence. He married and went to work for the First National Bank in Austin as a teller, despite having no experience and, apparently, no talent for the job.
To supplement his income and his interest, he published his own weekly newspaper, the "Rolling Stone." The paper, consisting mostly of Porter's drawings and satirical prose sketches, did well at first, but faltered quickly and went out of business. Porter had heard many of the "lost treasure" stories that abounded in Texas, and he followed one such tale to Shoal Creek in Austin, but the treasure he sought remained lost and Porter remained broke.
His career as a bank teller came to a screeching halt in 1894, when a bank examiner couldn't make heads or tails of Porter's till, other than the fact that there wasn't as much money in it as there was supposed to be. He was accused of embezzlement and was defended by his co-workers, but the bank pursued charges. His father-in-law negotiated a settlement and Porter went to work writing a column for the Houston Daily Post that proved promising, but troubles back at the bank escalated.
Porter was an easy scapegoat when the bank's book were found to be riddled with shortages and discrepancies. He didn't know enough about the banking business to defend himself and he couldn't afford a lawyer. Considering all his options, he hopped a steamer to the Honduras.
Porter adapted well to island life. He drank freely and shared stories with a fugitive bank robber he befriended. He wrote his wife, Athol, asking her to join him in his island paradise, but found out that she was ill and not expected to live much longer.
Resigning himself to his own fate, he returned to Austin to be with Athol. He was arrested and convicted of stealing two checks from the bank, but charges of embezzling the larger amounts were dropped. He was sentenced to five years in the federal penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio. There, he worked in the prison pharmacy and wrote a lot of short stories, which were by now being published by national magazines. The publishing world of New York City and literary immortality were waiting on him when he was released from prison.
Porter first began using the pseudonym O. Henry in Austin. He adopted it again in New York, possibly to keep from being traced back to that convicted embezzler. He published more than 300 stories under that name. The stories were collected into nine best-selling volumes during his lifetime and many more in subsequent years.
Many of the Texas stories can be found in the 1907 collection, "The Heart of the West." He also created the character The Cisco Kid, which was the basis of the 1950s television series of the same name. The county's most prestigious short story award is named in his honor and his work is still in print and widely read.
