Salem Press

Great Lives from History: The 19th Century offers worldwide coverage of important men and women in all areas of achievement who flourished between 1801 and 1900. Below is an excerpt from the Great Lives's essay on O. Henry.

O. Henry
In March, 1894, Porter (O. Henry) and a partner bought a struggling scandal sheet and its press and used it to publish humorous commentary and stories, many of them poking fun at the large German community of central Texas. They soon changed its name to The Rolling Stone, stimulating Austin through the next twelve months.

A crucial change in Porter’s life began in December, 1894, when bank examiner F. B. Gray uncovered shortages in the accounts and charged him with embezzlement of bank funds. Porter left the bank to spend more time with The Rolling Stone, but it folded in April. In July, a grand jury refused to indict Porter, but Gray persisted.

In October, 1895, Porter accepted a new job writing for the Houston Post. In February, 1896, Gray succeeded in getting four indictments against him. Porter wrote his last Houston Post column on June 22. On July 6, he boarded a train heading up to Austin for his trial; after fifty miles he apparently got off and, hours later, boarded an eastbound train to seek anonymity in New Orleans, Louisiana. With his excellent command of Spanish, he decided that he could build a new life in Honduras, which had no extradition treaty with the United States, and that he could then send for his wife and daughter to join him there until the statute of limitations expired. Honduras was at that time a stereotypical banana republic but politically more stable than most of its neighbors. Once there, he mixed with the swindlers, bank presidents, confidence men, and other brigands who would later populate some of his stories. The pueblo of Trujillo, Honduras, later became Coralio, Anchuria, in his Cabbages and Kings (1904).

The flaw in Porter’s Honduras plan was that Athol’s tuberculosis was too serious to let her leave her mother’s care. In January, 1897, he returned to Austin. He posted a new court bond and spent the next several months caring for his wife until, on July 25, she died. Porter stayed in Austin writing freelance articles and stories. He finally went to trial on February 15, 1898. The evidence seems to imply that Porter was innocent but unwilling to implicate others. However, the jury convicted him on three counts, and he was sentenced to the lightest possible term, five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

- J. Edmund Rush