Alias O. Henry

TK-page paperback / 5.5" x 8.5" / ISBN 9781589882065
Publication Date: 9/16/2025 (available for preorder)

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.

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. 

PRAISE FOR BEN YAGODA AND HIS 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

Ben Yagoda is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books, most recently Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English (Princeton University Press, 2024). 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. 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.