Alias O. Henry

O. Henry first stepped foot in New York City in 1902, a time of remarkable change when the city's physical presence was being altered by new skyscrapers, subways, and institutions, and its character by waves of immigrants, mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe. O. Henry was 39 years old, but of course O. Henry wasn't his real name. He was born William Sidney Porter (at some point he changed the spelling of his middle name to "Sydney"), and his most significant recent residence was the Ohio Penitentiary, where he had served three and a half years for embezzling. That had afforded him a significant amount of free time, and he had used it to write short stories, a number of which he had sold to America's biggest magazines.

The magazines were all based in New York, hence Porter's arrival in the city. Within five years, he would become the most successful fiction writer in the country, and a Manhattan personage. But he never--never--said anything about his prison experience, or, indeed, anything about his past life. Anything true, that is. In life as well as on the page, Porter was a yarn-spinner of the highest order.

In Alias O. Henry, Yagoda imagines what the reasons for Porter's reticence might be as well as the origin stories of some of his most famous tales, and he draws a riveting portrait of New York City in this time of change. Along the way, Porter gets sucked into a blackmail scheme and tries to fight his way out with the help of Bat Masterson (the legendary lawman was in New York at the time, writing a newspaper sports column) and Hattie Rose, an African-American woman who had devoted her life to rescuing girls from White Slavery, aka prostitution. Adding to the richness and texture are cameo appearances from such luminaries as Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, George Bellows, and Thomas Edison.