Many readers have come to love the short story through the simple characters, humor and easy narrative voice, and the compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, including those back for a second, third, or fourth look. Even now one can say “Gift of the Magi” in a conversation about a love affair or marriage, and almost any literate person will know what is meant. It’s hard to think of many other American writers whose work has been so incorporated into our national shorthand.
O. Henry was a newspaperman, skilled at hiding from his editors at deadline. A prolific writer, he wrote to make a living and to make sense of his life. He spent his childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, and his mature years in New York City. In between Texas and New York, he served out a prison sentence for bank fraud in Columbus, Ohio. Accounts of the origin of his pen name vary: one story dates from his days in Austin, where he was said to call the wandering family cat “Oh! Henry!”; another states that the name was inspired by the captain of the guard at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Orrin Henry.
Porter had devoted friends, and it’s not hard to see why. He was charming and had an attractively gallant attitude. He drank too much and neglected his health, which caused his friends concern. He was often short of money; in a letter to a friend asking for a loan of $15 (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: “If it isn’t convenient, I’ll love you just the same.” His banker was unavailable most of Porter’s life. His sense of humor was always with him.
Reportedly, Porter’s last words were from a popular song: “Turn up the light, for I don’t want to go home in the dark.”
Eight years after O. Henry’s death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and Sciences) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a group of them met at the Biltmore Hotel in December of that year to establish some kind of memorial to him. They decided to award annual prizes in his name for short story writers, and they formed a committee to read the short stories published in a year and a smaller group to pick the winners. In the words of Blanche Colton Williams (1879–1944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial was intended to “strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.”
Doubleday, Page & Company was chosen to publish the first volume, O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories 1919. In 1927, the society sold all rights to the annual collection to Doubleday, Doran & Company. Doubleday published The O. Henry Prize Stories, as it came to be known, in hardcover, and from 1984 to 1996 its subsidiary, Anchor Books, published it simultaneously in paperback. Since 1997, The O. Henry Prize Stories has been published as an original Anchor Books paperback.
The series editor chooses the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories.
Each year, three writers distinguished for their fiction are asked to act as jurors, who read the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of either author or publication. The jurors make their choice of favorite independently of one another and the series editor, and write an appreciation of the story they most admire.
Stories published in American and Canadian magazines distributed in North America are eligible for inclusion in The O. Henry Prize Stories. Stories must be written originally in the English language. No translations are considered. Sections of novels are not considered. Editors are asked to send all the fiction they publish and not to nominate individual stories. Stories should not be submitted by agents or writers.
(Please see this page for the submission address.)
The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.