O. Henry, born William Sidney Porter, arrived in New York City fresh from the Ohio Penitentiary, where he had served three-and-a-half years for embezzlement. It was the dawn of the 20th century, a time of remarkable change when the city’s physical presence was being altered by new skyscrapers and subways, and its character by waves of immigrants. The American magazine had just reached its pinnacle as an enterprise, and the short story was the most popular medium in entertainment.

Porter was in the city to write. From his cell, he had already sold a number of stories to big magazines, and within five years of arriving in Manhattan, he would become the most successful fiction writer in the country. But he never --- never --- said anything about his prison experience, or, indeed, anything about his past life. Anything true, that is. In life as well as on the page, Porter was a yarn-spinner of the highest order.

In this twisting tale, Ben Yagoda uses the novelist’s art to get at the truth that lay behind Porter’s reticence, and in doing so, he presents an iridescent portrait of New York at the time. As Porter makes the city his home, he becomes embroiled in a blackmail scheme, and as he attempts to extricate himself, we meet newspapermen and grifters, street urchins, train robbers, detectives, shopgirls and prostitutes. Yagoda cleverly hints at the origins of some of Porter’s best-known stories and allows other legends of the time, such as law man Bat Masterson, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, George Bellows and Thomas Edison, to flit, often unremarked, across the pages of this deeply researched work of historical fiction.