You’ve probably heard the story about the young couple who were short on money but who desperately want to buy each other Christmas gifts…Unbeknownst to the man, the young woman sells her most valuable possession, her hair in order to buy a fob for his pocket-watch, which he sold to buy fancy brushes for her hair.
Remember the story? The Gift of the Magi…by North Carolina native William Sidney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry
Because Porter moved around quite a bit and wrote most of his works in New York City, folks might not know that he was a native of the North Carolina, born in Greensboro.
In his early life he learned how to be a pharmacist in his uncle’s drugstore and traveled west at age 21 thinking the dry climate would help with his persistent cough…he worked as a ranch hand, a draftsman, bank teller and journalist.
When he moved to Austin, Texas he met young lady from a wealthy Austin family. He was courting her against her family’s wishes, if only because she was sick with tuberculosis…or what they called consumption. They eloped. And two years later a daughter was born.
Porter settled down and got a job as a bookkeeper at a local bank…he was soon thereafter accused of embezzlement but wasn’t indicted at that time…he moved the family to Houston, but a federal audit of the Austin bank sent U.S. Marshals looking for him.
Fearing the worst Porter fled…and wound up alone in Honduras, which did not have an extradition treaty for criminals. When he learned that his wife was dying he came back and turned himself in, and he was sentenced to five years and sent to a prison in Ohio.
In a case of fact being stranger than fiction, he worked as a druggist at the prison hospital…and was released after three years for good behavior and accurate prescriptions apparently. Such obvious bits of irony would spark and fuel his writing style.
He moved to New York and continued his writing career, which had begun to flourish while was in prison writing under the pseudonym “O Henry”
After his first wife died, he began a correspondence with a childhood sweetheart, who lived near Asheville, a romance began and they were married in 1907. Because of failing health due to extreme alcoholism she convinced him to move to the mountains of NC to recuperate. But he found he couldn’t write there because…wait for it…it was too peaceful…he needed the hustle and bustle, the bars and nightclubs of city life, so he moved back to New York resumed writing but subsequently died a couple of years later because of complications from cirrhosis of the liver.
In a plot twist worthy of his over 600 short stories, Porter did find his way back to North Carolina, where he is resting in the peace and quiet at Riverside Cemetery in Asheville.
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