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University Communications

Southern Historian to Speak on Life of Short Story Writer O. Henry at University of Richmond

March 7, 2002

Southern historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown will examine the life of celebrated short story writer O. Henry in a March 20 speech at the University of Richmond.

Wyatt-Brown will discuss "Southern Humor, Duplicity and Melancholy" in the North Carolina-born writer's life and work in the annual Peple Lecture at 7:30 p.m. in the Modlin Center for the Arts. The speech is free and open to the public.

Wyatt-Brown, whose 2001 book "The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace and War" examines the foundations of Southern ideals and conventions, will look at O. Henry's life from his formative years in the Tarheel State -- where he grew up as William Sydney Porter -- to his brilliant career in New York.

"What happened to him between those locations," Wyatt-Brown says, "he deliberately shrouded in a veil of secrecy." Assuming a pen name was part of that strategy.

"The intriguing issue is not so much what the artist wrote," Wyatt-Brown says, "but what he did not write about: his own murky and tragic past."

Wyatt-Brown also wrote "Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South," which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and two studies of novelist Walker Percy's family, "The House of Percy"and "The Literary Percys."

Wyatt-Brown, Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida, is at Richmond this year as the Douglas Southall Freeman Visiting Professor of History.