I got to know about the writer of the story. So O. Henry was the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, who wrote colorful short stories with surprising and ironic twists. His best-known titles included "The Last of the Troubadours," "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief." O.Henry pioneered in picturing the lives of lower-class and middle-class New Yorkers.

Porter attended school for a short time, then clerked in an uncle's drugstore. At the age of 20 William Sydney Porter went to Texas, working first on a ranch and later as a bank teller. In 1887 he married and began to write freelance sketches. A few years later he founded a humorous weekly, the Rolling Stone. When this failed, he became a reporter and columnist on the Houston Post.

Indicted in 1896 for embezzling bank funds (actually a result of technical mismanagement), Porter fled to a reporting job in New Orleans, then to Honduras. When news of his wife's serious illness reached him, he returned to Texas. After her death William Sydney Porter was imprisoned in Columbus, Ohio. During his three-year incarceration, he wrote adventure stories set in Texas and Central America that quickly became popular and were collected inCabbages and Kings (1904).

Released from prison in 1902, Porter went to New York City, his home and the setting of most of his fiction for the remainder of his life. Writing prodigiously under the pen name O. Henry, he completed one story a week for a newspaper, in addition to other stories for magazines. Popular collections of his stories included The Four Million (1906); Heart of the West and The Trimmed Lamp(both 1907); The Gentle Grafter and The Voice of the City (both 1908); Options (1909); and Whirligigs and Strictly Business (both 1910).

O. Henry's most representative collection was probably The Four Million. The title and the stories answered the snobbish claim of socialite Ward McAllister that only 400 people in New York "were really worth noticing" by detailing events in the lives of everyday Manhattanites. In his most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi," a poverty-stricken New York couple secretly sell valued possessions to buy one another Christmas gifts. Ironically, the wife sells her hair so that she can buy her husband a watch chain, while he sells his watch so that he can buy her a pair of combs.

Incapable of integrating a book-length narrative, O. Henry was skilled in plotting short ones. He wrote in a dry, humorous style and, as in "The Gift of the Magi," frequently used coincidences to underline ironies.His short stories were masterworks of careful plotting and surprise endings: in The Ransom of Red Chief, for instance, a kidnapped tyke is so much trouble that the kidnappers end up paying the boy's father to take him back. O. Henry's work appeared in magazines and journals across the country and were collected in such books as Cabbages and Kings (1904), Heart of the West (1907) and The Voice of the City(1908). Even after O. Henry's death on June 5, 1910, stories continued to be collected: Sixes and Sevens(1911); Rolling Stones (1912); Waifs and Strays (1917); O. Henryana (1920); Letters to Lithopolis (1922); Postscripts (1923); and O. Henry Encore (1939).   No stranger to alcohol and plagued by ill health, he died broke at the age of 47.