William Sydney Porter (1862-1910) published all of his worka novel
and some 300 short storiesunder the pseudonym 0. Henry. His talent
for vivid caricature, local tone, narrative agility, and compassion
tempered by irony made him a vastly popular writer in the last
decade of his life. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, to
ordinary middle-class parents and worked in an uncle's drugstore as
a youth, becoming a certified pharmacist. Like many Southerners
after the Civil War, he sought his fortune in the West, holding
various jobs (newspaper work, clerking in a land office, a teller
at an Austin bank). Charged with embezzlement in 1894, he fled to
Honduras, returning in 1897 to be with his ill and dying wife. His
conviction was caused more by his eluding trial than by the
conflicting evidence of theft. In the Ohio State Penitentiary
(1898-1901), he began to write the stories that made him famous. He
moved to New York, remarried, and kept his identity a secret from
all but a few friends. He is buried in Asheville, North Carolina.
He is universally honored for his mastery of the short story and
for his humane spirit.
Burton Raffel has taught English, Classics, and Comparative
Literature at universities in the United States, Israel, and
Canada. His books include translations of Beowulf, Horace- Odes,
Epodes, Epistles, Satires, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil
Anwar, From the Vietnamese, Ten Centuries of Poetry, The Complete
Poetry of Osip Emilevich, Mandelstram (with Alla Burago), and Poems
From the Old English and The Annotated Milton; several critical
studies, Introduction to Poetry, How to Read a Poem, The
Development of Modern Indonesian Poetry, and The Forked Tounge- A
Study of the Translation Process; and Mia Poems, a volume of his
own poetry. Mr. Raffel practiced law on Wall Street and taught in
the Ford Foundation's English Language Teacher Training Project in
Indonesia.
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