O. Henry is the pen name of William Sidney Porter, who was born on September 11, 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Porter was a licensed pharmacist and worked on a sheep ranch in Texas. He was a draftsman for the General Land Office and a teller for the First National Bank of Texas. He was convicted of embezzlement and eventually served five years in prison. While in prison, he began writing short stories under his pseudonym and eventually wrote over 300. As O. Henry, Porter is one of America's best known writers, and his stories, such as "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief", are still taught in schools. In 1918, the O. Henry Awards, an annual anthology of short stories,… was established in his honor. Porter died on June 5, 1910.Writer James Hynes loves cats and has worked them into several of his publications, including his collection of three novellas entitled Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. A combination of horror story and academic satire, Publish and Perish was the result of Hynes yearning to create horror stories in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe and M.R. James. Hynes first gained national attention in 1990 with the publication of The Wild Colonial Boy. In addition, his essays on television criticism have appeared in Mother Jones and Utne Reader.