O. Henry, whose Forever® stamp is now available online and in Post Offices nationwide, may have been a phenomenally successful author, but many details of his life (including how he arrived at that pseudonym, for example) remain uncertain. He gave varying answers to questions about himself. He had also spent time in prison, which may have made him reluctant to be photographed or interviewed—at least in part.

We do know that O. Henry was born William Sydney Porter on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. As a boy, he was known as Will. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was small, and his father, a physician, fell into alcoholism and debt. Will was left mostly in the care of his grandmother and an aunt, who taught him to read and encouraged his artistic interests. By the time he was 15 years old, he was working at his uncle’s drugstore; he became a licensed pharmacist while still in his teens.

As a young man, Porter went to Texas, where he worked at various jobs and married the daughter of a businessman in Austin. When funds at a bank where he had worked turned up short, Porter came under suspicion. Rather than stand trial, he left the country and went to Honduras. Concern for his terminally ill wife drew him back to Texas; she died in 1897, and the following year he was tried, found guilty despite his plea of innocence, and sentenced to the penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. There, he served more than three years of a five-year sentence and worked in the prison pharmacy.

While in prison, he also began writing stories under the name of “O. Henry.” Upon his release in 1901, he stayed briefly in Pittsburgh and then moved on to New York, where he began to earn a regular income by writing for newspapers and magazines. By the time of his death on June 5, 1910, O. Henry was the most widely read storyteller in America and admired worldwide. He wrote nearly 300 stories, most in the final eight years of his life.

The O. Henry Prize Stories, an anthology published annually since 1919, testifies to O. Henry’s continuing influence on American letters. After his death, his friends established the yearly collection to honor him and to encourage the ongoing development of the art of the short story.