Gift Of The Magi By O Henry And The Influence Prison Had On The Setting

Starting as a journalist writing for the New York Sunday World Magazine, William Sydney Porter was not always a short story writer. Following his arrest in 1896, he spent the next three and a half years in prison, transforming into the Short story writer widely known today as O Henry. Many of his stories have a sense of unexpectedness due to the unexpectedness of his life. With this in mind. The setting of “Gift of the Magi” may have been influenced by O Henry’s (William Sydney Porter) time in prison.

In the early years of William Sydney Porter’s adult life, he worked as a teller for the First National Bank in Austin. During his time as a teller, he was working a side job as a journalist. He worked as a reporter, cartoonist, and Columnist for the Houston Post. Porter started his literary career as a journalist. This venture, however, came to a swift halt when reports came up about potential embezzlement. A finding from an article about O Henry by Robert Buerki shows that In November of 1894, the bank found irregularities in Will’s accounts. He lost his job at the bank, was arrested, and was ordered to stand trial for embezzlement. (Buerki 5).

Beurki then writes that “Will fled to Honduras while free on bail.” (Buerki 5). Porter did this to avoid going to prison and facing time. This “flee-cation” of his did not last long. Only six months in, he found out that his wife fell ill. “The following January, The illness of his wife called him back to Austin, where he faced federal prosecution.” (Buerki 5-6). However, the authorities were relatively lenient, allowing him to spend the rest of his wife’s life as a free man.

Still a journalist, William Sydney Porter was put on trial. “Will’s trial opened in February 1898; to the 4 original indictments for embezzlement, two more were added as a result of his flight to avoid prosecution.” (Buerki 6). It is important to note, as Hudson Long writes, that ”O. Henry’s trial and conviction [was] not for theft but for embezzlement.” (Long 96). Porter was sent to “Ohio Penitentiary as federal prisoner No. 30564” (Buerki 5). His original sentence was five years; however, as Buerki writes, “On July 24, 1901, his sentence shortened for good behavior.” His final sentence length was three and a half years.

As reported by Buerki, the last people saw of William Sydney Porter, the journalist, was when his fellow inmates urged him to expose the terrible conditions in his writing as he was a great writer who knew how to persuade. The inmates suffered “Beatings to the point of insensibility, rancid food purchased by bribed prison officials, neglect to the extent of being carried off to the morgue while still alive, and the other inhumane brutalities suffered by the prisoners generally left Porter too stunned to comment openly about them. When his fellow prisoners urged him to expose these conditions in his writings, he was said to have replied that since he was not a reporter, the prison and its shame were not his responsibility.” (Buerki 7). Porter, however, refused, and this was the beginning of the end of his life as a journalist.

Porter’s time in prison was crucial for his career. Porter, like many, was a family man. He had a daughter named Margaret. During his time in prison, Porter wanted to be able to provide for Margaret. So, he began to write short stories to provide while at the same time being an inmate in the Ohio Penitentiary. John Beaty described this change as “He had passed from journalism to literature; He had turned a stumbling rock into a stepping-stone.” (Beaty 241)

The time finally came for William Sydney Porter to leave prison. When he left prison, his life, his career, and even his name were changed forever. “William Sydney Porter passed out of the penitentiary walls and into the annals of American literature.”(Buerki 7). Wanting to look to the future instead of the past, William Sydney Porter transitioned into the world of cherished American literature. “Several of his stories appeared in magazines under the name ‘Oliver Henry’.”(Rollins 218). According to Hyder E. Rollins, he picked the name O Henry because he found the name Henry to be fashionable, and O is the easiest letter to write. (Rollins 217-8).

Porter started writing many stories after his release from prison, and according to Buerki, “from 1899 to 1910 he produced nearly 300 short stories” (Buerki 3). His stories ranged in topics, but “for the sake of vividness the majority of his stories were told in the first person” (Rollins 266). Moreover, one of the most commonly accepted descriptions of his stories by scholars such as Rollins is that his endings are generally human (Rollins 266).

Porter wrote his most famous work, “Gift of The Magi,” in 1905. The story is about a wife who cuts her hair to pay for a necklace for her husband. The story’s irony is that the husband sold his watch to afford nice combs for his wife’s hair. The moral of the story was that both gave up their prized possessions to afford a nice gift for the other. This story performed tremendously and was his most famous work to date.

The ending was unexpected and taught great lessons such as to love people, not possessions. Rollins described Porter’s style of his endings as unique and that the biggest surprise O Henry could have given would be an expected ending. (Rollins 266). The time Porter spent in prison may have made him ponder his life; it made him ponder how unexpected his path was. The style of writing he adopted after his release in prison is reflected by how unexpected this turn in his life was. Porter never knew his wife would fall ill, and he would need to return to Austin merely for authorities to arrest him. Porter took that surprise and injected it into the readers as they read through the stories. 

Life is a mashup of unexpected turns and changes. William Sydney Porter started as a journalist for a Houston paper; however, after being arrested, he fled to Honduras, only to be called back to Austin and be arrested. His time in prison made him realize that life is full of surprises, and he implemented that into every story he wrote, just as he did in “The Gift of the Magi.”