The O. Henry Museum preserves a modest home connected to one of America's best-known short-story writers. William Sidney Porter lived in Austin before adopting the O. Henry pen name, and the museum uses the house, personal objects and literary material to connect his Texas years with the observational humor, surprise endings and wordplay that later made his stories famous.
Because the house is small, this is a focused stop rather than a half-day museum. That intimacy is part of its value: visitors can see the domestic setting associated with Porter's Austin life without a large institutional layer between the writer and the place. The museum's programs also keep O. Henry's love of language visible through events such as the long-running Pun-Off.
The house stands in Brush Square next to the Susanna Dickinson Museum and close to the Austin Convention Center, making the two museums an easy paired visit. One tells a literary story rooted in late-nineteenth-century Austin, while the other reaches back to the Texas Revolution and the life of a woman whose history extended far beyond the Alamo.
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