One young man who had moved to Austin in 1884—William Sydney Porter, a wry, mustachioed North Carolina native who had dreams of being a writer—was so fascinated by what he saw that he sometimes slipped out of Harrell’s Cigar Store, where he worked, just to wander the streets. A couple of decades later, after the young Porter had moved to New York, changed his name to O. Henry, and become the most popular American short story writer of the late nineteenth century, literary scholars would study his fiction, wondering just how much of it was based on what he had experienced during his Austin
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