O. Henry

O. Henry, born William Sydney Porter in North Carolina in 1862, lost his mother at three, left school at fifteen and was apprenticed in his uncle's drugstore, becoming a licensed pharmacist. At twenty he went to a Texas ranch for his health and learned to herd sheep and to speak Spanish and some German; later, in Austin, he worked as a draughtsman and a bank teller and ran a humorous weekly. Accused of embezzling funds while at the bank, he fled to Honduras, came back when his wife was dying, gave himself up and was sentenced to five years in prison. There he served as pharmacist in the prison hospital and began writing stories under the name 'O. Henry'. After his release he went to New York and wrote a story almost every week for the newspapers, nearly three hundred in eight years, about the shop girls, clerks, tramps and little people of New York, earning the name 'the poet laureate of Manhattan'. He died of illness at forty-seven.