O. Henry

O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), the most popular American short-story writer of his day and still the byword for the twist ending. He came to fiction late and sideways — pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller, fugitive in Honduras, and finally federal prisoner in Ohio, where he began publishing stories to support his daughter. Out of prison he moved to New York, and the city became his subject: shopgirls, clerks, con men, and couples scraping by in furnished rooms.

At his peak he wrote a story a week for the New York World, and the best of them — compact, wry, engineered to snap shut in the final paragraph — turned the surprise ending into a national institution. Critics have called him sentimental; readers have never cared. His gift was for finding, in small lives and smaller apartments, reversals that feel both impossible and inevitable.