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Let Me Feel Your Pulse
by
O. Henry (1862-1910)
[William Sidney Porter]

Evidently a charming man, Porter was a talented singer and a cartoonist. Two talents that endeared him to many. He was also a talented cartographer and was able to earn a good living at this occupation in his early years at the Texas Land Office located in Austin. Several other jobs followed, including teller at the local bank, but the lack of imagination in those positions apparently did not sustain his creative energy. In 1894 he started a humorous newspaper and tried his hand at writing for the paper. Called the "Rolling Stone," the paper never garnered the subscription base to make the investment profitable and Porter moved to Huston, Texas where he wrote briefly for the Huston Post but his debts followed him and in desperation he abandoned his wife and family and took a temporary job in New Orleans and when the debts continued to mount, he fled to Honduras. The grave illness of his wife brought him back to Austin in 1897 where he was placed on trial for his debts as he was attending to Athol.. Within a short time his wife died and he was convicted of  embezzlement and sentenced to prison. These were two severe blows that he seemed to never recover from.

 He was sentenced to the federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio for a period of five years, but was released short of the full five years.  It was while in prison, that he adopted the pseudonym, O. Henry. Although it is debated among scholars why he chose this name, the most amusing and plausible reason given for this choice is his memory of calling for the cat belonging to the Harrell family cat, whose name was "Henry". Apparently he was given to calling loudly, "Oh, Henry!" and this memory may have had some special meaning for him.

Using the pen name "O. Henry", William Sidney Porter produced numerous short stories during his prison years. Many were published to great public acclaim. Upon his release from prison, he did not return to Texas, but went to Pittsburgh and then on to New York City where  he wrote intensively for several magazines, including the widely read New York World. Alcoholism and the strain of continuing debt began to take a toll on his tenuous health and he removed himself to Asheville, North Carolina in 1907 where he encountered his old childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsay Coleman, and married her. Sarah lived in Weaverville and the two had a rocky year before the relationship reportedly fell apart. He left Sarah in 1908, the following year, and returned to New York City where he died of cirrhosis of the liver on June 5, 1910. He was brought back to Ashville by his wife and was buried in Riverside Cemetery, where today he keeps company with Asheville's most notable writer, Thomas Wolfe.

O. Henry's stay in Asheville, while very brief from 1907 to 1908, generated the background for several of his short stories and novels. While Asheville never served as an inspiration in the manner that New York did, O. Henry nonetheless succinctly recreates life in the small city and the surrounding mountains. In this work, Let Me Feel Your Pulse, first published in serial form in The Cosmopolitan magazine in July of 1910, under the title, "Adventures in Neurasthenia," O. Henry captures the black humor sometimes found in illness and no doubt he pulls from some of  his earliest memories of his physician father, Algernon Sidney Porter. This work perhaps is his humorous attempt to try to come to terms with the relationship he never had with an absent father and with his own guilt and struggles with his chronic alcoholism. It is easy to imagine Algernon Sidney Porter in his office with Will where they both try to come to terms with the debilitating alcoholism of the son and the omissions of the physician father. The wonderful passages of the mountain searches for the "curing plant," shows us the Blue Ridge Mountains at their best and O. Henry in his most engaging form.

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