Stale Rolls

William Sydney Porter stepped into world literature history straight out of a prison cell. He wrote his first story while serving a sentence for embezzling bank money (though there’s a version that the charge was false) and published under the pen name O. Henry. Later he moved to New York, where he wrote more than 250 novellas, in which he skillfully and ironically portrayed ordinary people, while the situations the characters found themselves in were fresh, original, and unpredictable. Critics called the writer “the American Kipling,” “the American Maupassant,” and even “the American Chekhov.” But he managed to rise above all that fuss, becoming the one and only, unmistakable American O. Henry.