Abstract
Henry O is the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter. He was born in 1862 in North Carolina and died in 1910 of cirrhosis because he was an alcoholic. In his youth, W. S. Porter exercised a lot of jobs and in 1898, he went to jail because a few years before, when he had worked as a bank clerk in Austin, he had embezzled money. During his imprisonment, he began to write short-stories to earn money for his daughter. He left prison in 1901 and took the pseudonym of Henry O. In 1902, he moved to New York where he wrote about the life of ordinary people in the city. In this text, there are two main characters who are Sue and Joanna. Joanna is used to be called Johnsy and she calls Sue with a fond name, Sudie. Johnsy and Sue share the same tastes in a lot of domains and live in the same studio in Greenwich Village in New York. They are both artists. Sue draws pictures for magazines stories and Johnsy wants to paint the Bay of Naples. Neither Sue nor Johnsy get married. Behrman is another important character. He is a neighbour of Sue and Johnsy who lives on the floor below. Behrman is an old man in his sixties and has a curly beard and the body of an imp. He earns a little money by serving as a model to young artists and drinks gin. Since he was young, his dream had been to paint a masterpiece but in reality, Behrman was a failure in art.
