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Portrait image of O. Henry

Sample of authors

Henry, O.

O. Henry was born as William Sidney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina. He later changed the spelling of his middle name to "Sydney". His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When Porter's mother died of tuberculosis in 1865, father and son went to live with William's grandmother where he was chiefly raised by an aunt due to his father's heavy drinking. As a teenager, he trained at...

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Literary figures

William Tobin

Gender: Male

A police detective in New York with a university education – he graduated from Princetown in 1918 – and the main character in three novels by Dorothy B. Hughes. William ‘Toby’ Tobin is small of stature, with a thin face. Yet he acts with considerable poise, and he speaks so sharply that the words ‘fall like hailstones’. Little is known about his private life, but he smokes heavily and does not lik...

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