O. Henry Papers

This book is a collection, an assembly, gathered from many sources of the most intimate and significant of the O. Henry memoirs. They will give a glimpse of the little known life of Sydney Porter, and the alphabetical index will be a convenient guide to his works. The authoritative "O. Henry Biography," by Professor C. Alphonso Smith of the United States Naval Academy was published in 1916. Many years earlier the plans for this book were laid by Harry Peyton Steger, a friend of Sydney Porter's who visited, in 1912, every haunt of O. Henry in the South and brought to light a quantity of the dijecta membra of O. Henry's early literary efforts. These were later collected in the volume called Rolling Stones. Steger's faith in the ultimate position which O. Henry would occupy in American literature was of the type which moves mountains. He was an indefatigable worker for the spread of O. Henry's fame after he died, and probably did more than any other individual to lay the foundations of O. Henry's popularity. The article by George MacAdam, O. Henry's only interviewer, is new material, now printed in full for the first time. The sketches by Arthur Page and Richard Duffy are reprinted from The Bookman.