But when he learned that his wife was ill he returned to be with her, and to stand trial. Porter later wrote several linked stories set in a “banana republic” (a term he seems to have coined).
Honduras was an attractive haven for people in Porter’s situation, because it did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Just before his trial was scheduled to start, in the summer of 1896, he fled to Honduras, leaving his wife and his six-year-old daughter behind. A second grand jury was convened, and this time Porter was indicted. The bank was happy to settle, and a grand jury refused to issue an indictment. On the few occasions that Porter is reported to have alluded to the episode, he implied that he was covering for someone else, but he never said who it was. The shortfall could have been a matter of sloppy bookkeeping, or it could be that others were in on the pilfering. That may be true, but what really happened is unclear. It was natural to assume that Porter had borrowed money from the till to keep his struggling magazine out of debt, intending to pay it back. In 1894, a federal bank examiner discovered a shortage of $5,654 in the First National Bank’s accounts, and accused Porter of embezzlement. After Porter and his wife had a daughter, he took a job as a teller in the First National Bank of Austin. He liked to listen to people talk about themselves, and he used their stories as the basis for his fiction. And he began a lifelong practice of roaming the streets, hanging out in bars (he was a prodigious drinker, with a reputation for being able to handle his liquor), and observing life after dark. It seems to have been love at first sight-something that happens more than once in O. Henry stories. He later published a number of stories set in the West.
Soon afterward, he moved to Texas and worked on a ranch, although he spent much of his time there reading. At nineteen, he was licensed as a pharmacist (his uncle’s occupation), and his stories have occasional references to drugs and medications, many of which can look fictional to a layperson but are apparently accurate.
People found him affable, unpretentious, and somewhat inscrutable.Īs a writer, Porter was identified with New York City, where more than a hundred of his stories are set, but he was born in the Confederacy, in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1862, and he retained, as you can see in some of his stories, the racial prejudices of a white Southerner of his time. He was not a recluse, but he did not like to be the center of attention. The pseudonym was part of that effort, but Porter also avoided being photographed, rarely gave interviews, and steered clear of situations where someone might pry into his past. The writer-his real name was William Sidney Porter-had a secret, and he spent most of his adult life trying to conceal it. The story of the writer who called himself O. Henry could almost be an O. Henry story.
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