Word: porters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...very strange coincidence that William Sidney Porter's (alias O. Henry) last words whilst dying were "Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark," and over a century before, Goethe, whilst fading away, whispered his famous last words "Mehr Licht . . ." (More light...
William Sidney Porter was an alcoholic, a liar, a convicted embezzler. He betrayed his friends, deserted his family, fled the U.S. to escape prosecution, seldom paid his debts, deceived both his wives, and led many a simple shopgirl down the garden path. Yet, as O. Henry, he also wrote some of literature's most engaging short stories, and he had a grace of mind and manner that won nearly all who met him. Even one of his mothers-in-law said fervently: "Will was a noble man with a true heart...
...this excellent new biography Author Langford, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas, traces Porter's roller-coaster life and attempts to explain the contradictions of his personality. He was born in Greensboro, N.C., a year after the Civil War began, the son of a country doctor who neglected his practice to spend his time trying to build a perpetual-motion machine. Even by the standards of the Reconstruction South, the Porters were desperately poor, and at 19 Will went to Texas as the guest of another doctor who was worried...
Prison Banquet. To the Texas of the 1880s Will Porter seemed the beau ideal. He dressed nattily, was quick-witted, had a good voice for midnight serenades or amateur theatricals, could dash off a funny verse or a caricature with ease. He married pretty, well-to-do Athol Estes, promptly moved in with her stepfather, and through the efforts of a friend got a job at Austin's First National Bank. All went swimmingly until 1894, when Will was 32 and the father of a five-year-old daughter. Then a sharp-eyed bank examiner dropped...
More important, Porter at last had time to write. It was on some of the 14 stories he sent out from jail that he first used the name O. Henry-he chose the last name, said Porter, out of the society columns of a New Orleans newspaper and the initial O. because it is "about the easiest letter written." These first stories have all the professionalism of his later work-they are sentimental, comic, marvelously contrived and carry a sting of surprise at the end. Many turn on what was to be a constant theme for O. Henry: the vindication...