O . Henry was an American short-story writer, a master of surprising endings, who wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City . A twist of plot, which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance, is typical of O . Henry’s stories . William Sydney Porter ( O . Henry ) was born in North Carolina . His father was a physician . When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his grandmother and aunt . At the age of fifteen he left school, and then worked in a drug store . He moved to Houston, where he had a number of jobs, including that of a bank clerk . After moving to Austin, Texas, in 1882, he married . In 1884 he started a humorous weekly The Rolling Stone . When the weekly failed, he joined the Houston Post as a reporter and columnist . In 1897 he was convicted of embezzling money, although there has been much debate over his actual guilt . While in prison O . Henry started to write short stories to earn money to support his daughter Margaret . His first work, Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking ( 1899 ) , appeared in McClure’s Magazine . After doing three years of the five-year sentence, Porter emerged from the prison in 1901 and changed his name to O . Henry . O . Henry moved to New York City in 1902 and from December 1903 to January 1906 he wrote a story a week for the New York World , also was published in other magazines . Henry’s first collection, Cabbages and Kings appeared in 1904 . The second, The Four Million , was published two years later and included his well-known stories The Gift of the Magi and The Furnished Room . O . Henry published 10 collections and over 600 short stories during his lifetime . O . Henry’s last years were shadowed by ill health and financial problems . He married Sara Lindsay Coleman in 1907, but the marriage was not happy, and they separated one year later . O . Henry died on June 5, 1910, in New York .