A Life Story Told Through Short Stories Essay

A Life Story Told Through Short Stories Author O. Henry, also known as William Sydney Porter, is known for his short stories with witty narration, clever use of wordplay, and surprise endings. “After Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe, William Sydney Porter is the most read author in the world and bears the title ‘Master of the Short Story.’”(Winborne). Although most people don’t know that the overall underlying plot structure of an O. Henry short story is completely based off of his own life experiences. In an O. Henry story the first phase of his life is mirrored by the first phase of his story and so on throughout the work, which gave O. Henry a unique writing style and set him apart from other Authors of his time. The first twenty years of O. Henry’s life were uneventful, but carried much significance to the rest of his life, just like the first section of his short stories. O. Henry was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro North Carolina. His mom died when he was three so he was left in the care of his father who was a physician. O. Henry was an unusually avid reader all throughout his childhood(Noble Bandits). This information shows that O. Henry had a somewhat normal childhood, but there was a sense among those who knew him that his adulthood would be extraordinary, just as the reader gets the same sense in the beginning of his short stories. In “The Gift of The Magi”, O. Henry starts out by writing about a simple transaction only involving pennies, but this…