New forever stamp to honor O. Henry

 

In case you didn’t notice, Tuesday (Sept. 11) is the 150th birthday of William Sydney Porter, the short-story master better known as O. Henry.

Porter — who mostly wrote about New York City, but he was born in Greensboro on Sept. 11, 1862, and he was buried in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery after his death on June 5, 1910.

To mark the event, the U.S. Postal Service is releasing a commemorative forever stamp honoring O. Henry on Sept. 11 at the Greensboro Historical Museum.

O. Henry wrote more than 300 stories, most of them in the last nine years of his life, among them “The Gift of the Magi,” a Christmas standard, “The Ransom of Red Chief” and “A Retrieved Reformation.” Critic Guy Davenport compared his prose to ragtime music (they were almost contemporary), and he was a master of the “twist” ending — making possible about half the episodes on Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” and almost all the films of M. Night Shyamalan.

He began writing in Texas, launching a short-lived periodical called “Rolling Stone” and according to a later account, in an interview with The New York Times, he adopted his surname from a name in a society column. (Why O. Henry? Because as Porter told the Times, O was about the easiest letter to remember there was.)

As is well known, he went into the banking business in Texas, was charged with embezzlement (debate still rages about how much of it was actually his fault), fled to Honduras (where he wrote a series of stories and coined the phrase “banana republic”), but came back when he heard his wife was dying and faced the music.

He served three years in a federal penitentiary in Ohio; a licensed pharmacist, he worked in the prison infirmary and slept in a room nearby, so he apparently spent almost no time in a cell.

Legend holds that his last words, to his beloved daughter, were “Turn up the lights — I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

Almost all of Henry’s stories were set in the Big Apple, where he lived from 1901 until his death, but he did put a few in North Carolina — notably “The Fool Killer,” a comic take on a Tar Heel legend.
He was christened William SIDNEY Porter, but adopted Sydney-with-a-Y in 1898.

The followint are the Postal Service’s instructions for ordering a first-day of issue postmark:

“Customers have 60 days to obtain the first-day-of-issue postmark by mail. They may purchase the new stamp at a local Post Office, at The Postal Store website at usps.com/shop or by calling 800-STAMP24 (800-782-6724). They should affix the stamp to envelopes of their choice, address the envelopes (to themselves or others) and place them in larger envelopes addressed to:

“O. Henry Stamp
Postmaster
Greensboro Main Office
201 N. Murrow Blvd.
Greensboro, NC 27420-9998

“After applying the first-day-of-issue postmark, the Postal Service will return the envelopes by mail. There is no charge for the postmark. All orders must be postmarked by Nov. 12, 2012.”

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Source: http://books.blogs.starnewsonline.com/16513/new-forever-stamp-to-honor-o-henry/