If the best authors write from experience, O. Henry’s trademark wit and charm must have come from his eclectic life’s pursuits. Born William Sidney Porter in North Carolina and raised from the age of three, when he lost his mother to tuberculosis, by his maternal grandmother, he was surrounded by books and stories of all sorts. After school, he went into pharmacy, but his real talent was sketching. From there he went into map drafting and then briefly to banking, where either as a result of sloppy bookkeeping or outright embezzlement, he was arrested and convicted of fraud.

On this day, July 24, in 1901 O. Henry was released from prison in Austin, Texas, where he served three years for embezzlement. He did not spend the time idly: as a licensed pharmacist, by days he helped out the prison authorities, and by evenings his relatively greater freedom afforded him the opportunity to compose and keep sending his stories to publishers, who never even suspected the author was imprisoned.

Not that O. Henry wanted to go to jail. In fact he expanded no small amount of effort trying to avoid it. When the charges first came down, O. Henry fled to New Orleans with his family, and from there to Honduras, while his family was in Austin Texas. For several months, he was holed up in a seedy hotel, gathering impressions that he distilled in one of his best known works, Cabbages and Kings, that coined the term “banana republic”. O. Henry only came back to be at the bedside of his wife, who was gravely ill with tuberculosis.