Alias O. Henry - by Ben Yagoda (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

O. Henry, who may be best remembered for his short story "The Gift of the Magi," was a mysterious figure, as inventive with the details of his own life as he was in his fiction. In Alias O. Henry, Ben Yagoda vividly imagines O. Henry's life, as well as the events that could have inspired his most famous tales.

"Alias O. Henry finds Ben Yagoda on the prowl, tracking William Sydney Porter through the grime and glitter of turn-of-the-century New York. Here's Porter--not yet O. Henry--hustling poolrooms, conning marks, scribbling tales in rented rooms, and ducking the law while chasing the muse. Yagoda, part literary sleuth, part historian with a novelist's instinct, cracks open the city and the man. The result is pure O. Henry: unexpected, full of heart, and impossible to resist."
--Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon

"Alias O. Henry is a delight--a buoyant fictional conjecture about the writer's hidden life, full of surprise cameos, playful allusions, and other literary and historical Easter eggs. Best of all is Yagoda's rich portrayal of Ragtime-era New York City, an imaginative evocation as vivid and distinctive as O. Henry's own."
--Gary Krist, author of Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco

O. Henry, born William Sidney Porter, arrived in New York City fresh from the Ohio Penitentiary, where he had served three and a half years for embezzlement. It was the dawn of the twentieth century, a time of remarkable change when the city's physical presence was being altered by new skyscrapers and subways, and its character by waves of immigrants. The American magazine had just reached its pinnacle as an enterprise, and the short story was the most popular medium in entertainment. Porter was in the city to write. From his cell, he had already sold a number of stories to big magazines, and within five years of arriving in Manhattan, he would become the most successful fiction writer in the country. But he never--never--said anything about his prison experience, or, indeed, anything about his past life. Anything true, that is. In life as well as on the page, Porter was a yarn-spinner of the highest order.

In this twisting tale, Ben Yagoda uses the novelist's art to get at the truth that lay behind Porter's reticence, and doing so, he presents an iridescent portrait of New York at the time. As Porter makes the city his home, he becomes embroiled in a blackmail scheme, and as he attempts to extricate himself, we meet newspapermen and grifters, street urchins, train robbers, detectives, shopgirls, and prostitutes. Yagoda cleverly hints at the origins of some of Porter's best-known stories and allows other legends of the time, such as law man Bat Masterson, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, George Bellows, and Thomas Edison, to flit, often unremarked, across the pages of this deeply researched work of historical fiction.

Review Quotes

"The editor of an acclaimed edition of O. Henry's stories for the Library of America, Yagoda brings his research skills, knowledge of the author, and love of the era to this tale of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, evoking its crowded streets, many vices, and colorful (and often dangerous) citizenry, not to mention the lucrative world of freelance writing at a moment when short stories reigned supreme . . . Gotham might be a perilous place for most, but it's the perfect spot for a writer in need of material."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Alias O. Henry finds Ben Yagoda on the prowl, tracking William Sydney Porter through the grime and glitter of turn-of-the-century New York. Here's Porter--not yet O. Henry--hustling poolrooms, conning marks, scribbling tales in rented rooms, and ducking the law while chasing the muse. Yagoda, part literary sleuth, part historian with a novelist's instinct, cracks open the city and the man. The result is pure O. Henry: unexpected, full of heart, and impossible to resist."
--Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon

"Alias O. Henry is a delight--a buoyant fictional conjecture about the writer's hidden life, full of surprise cameos, playful allusions, and other literary and historical Easter eggs. Best of all is Yagoda's rich portrayal of Ragtime-era New York City, an imaginative evocation as vivid and distinctive as O. Henry's own."
--Gary Krist, author of Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco

"Ben Yagoda's imaginative portrait of William Sydney Porter is a jaunty ride through the bustling streets of New York at the dawn of the modern age--when newspaper men, gumshoes and shopgirls rubbed shoulders with the likes of Thomas Edison, Will Rogers and Bat Masterson. Weaving the facts of Porter's life together with the themes of his stories and the history of the city, Yagoda has created a novel with a vintage vibe and twisty plot worthy of the name O. Henry."
--Wes Davis, author of American Journey and The Ariadne Objective

"Ben Yagoda, the accomplished biographer, literary historian and linguist, has written his first work of fiction, and the result--Alias O. Henry--is a triumph. Blending a fecund imagination with a scholar's mastery of time and place, he has fashioned a beguiling portrait of America's most famous short-story writer (born in 1862 as William Sidney Porter) and the hectic metropolis on the Hudson that inspired 'The Gift of the Magi' and 'The Last Leaf.' With empathy and insight, Yagoda reminds us that New York, New York was the irresistible destination for hustlers and dreamers--including the secretive former pharmacist from North Carolina who became O. Henry--long before Sinatra sang about it."
--David Friedman, author of Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity

"Ben Yagoda brings the writer O. Henry fully to life with the affection and specificity that animate O. Henry's own stories. It's all here: early-century perfumes and stenches, music and cacophony, confidences and betrayals. That Yagoda--one of our great chroniclers of language--should find his way so masterfully to this story is no surprise. He delivers us into a Gotham cityscape at a time when new languages erupted in the deadline work of newspaper reporters, sports scribes, cartoonists and movie makers, years before their rugged glories congealed into mass media. Yet he also locates a certain promise for our media-drenched time: all is not lost if there is but a solitary writer using all six senses--the sixth being compassion--to return pen to paper."

--Michael Tisserand, author of Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White

"In this masterful and inspired exercise that can only be called researched-based time travel, author Ben Yagoda breathes new life into the rich spirit of O. Henry. Drawing on a library's worth of vintage material, Yagoda treats us to an accurate, vivid portrait of a quintessentially American character in his own time and place."
--Kenneth Finkel, professor emeritus, Temple University

"Alias O. Henry transports you into the world of the peripatetic--and sometimes prevaricating--William Sydney Porter. Ben Yagoda weaves two origin stories, Porter's and the inspirations for his works written as O. Henry. Yagoda takes you back to Porter's muse, that is, New York City, at the beginning of the 20th century from its gritty underbelly to the colorful characters that populate its noisy streets. This is a novel that entertains and delights."
--Delia Cabe, author of Storied Bars of New York: Where Literary Luminaries Go to Drink

PRAISE FOR BEN YAGODA'S EARLIER BOOKS:

"How lovely that someone has finally written a good biography of Will Rogers . . . It's a delight to be reminded that political humor without meanness of spirit is not only possible, but indeed is a great American tradition."
--Molly Ivins, New York Times Book Review, on Will Rogers: A Biography

"Clear as a Walker Evans photo . . . an utterly thorough, brilliant taking-apart of the unique Rogers persona. So immediate you can scratch a match on his boot sole."
--Kirkus Reviews on Will Rogers: A Biography

"Fascinating . . . With its mixture of literary criticism, cultural history and just enough trivia, Yagoda's survey is sure to appeal to scholars and bibliophiles alike."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Memoir: A History

"Yagoda writes so engagingly, and has put in so much time and effort, that one closes his book with the feeling that he has made a significant contribution."
--Michael Feinstein, New York Times, on The B Side

"[An] engaging romp . . . In Gobsmacked!, Yagoda shows readers how to delight in the lexical creativity of this ever-changing language."
--Wall Street Journal

"A shrewd, welcome meditation on literary style . . . that rarest of tomes: a splendidly written book about writing."
--Philadelphia Inquirer on The Sound on the Page

About the Author

Ben Yagoda is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books, most recently Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English (Princeton University Press, 2024) and O. Henry: 101 Stories (Library of America, 2021). He has written about language, writing, and many other topics for the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review and Magazine, Slate, The American Scholar, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and publications that start with every letter of the alphabet except X and Z. Yagoda has been awarded Guggenheim and MacDowell Fellowships to support his writing about O. Henry. His podcast, "The Lives They're Living," focuses on people whose achievements deserve renewed attention; episodes have included Gene Seymour on Ishmael Reed, Michael Tisserand on Jules Feiffer, Carrie Courogen on Elaine May, and Dwight Garner on Calvin Trillin. Yagoda lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Alias O. Henry is his first novel.