O. Henry Museum

About this museum

William Sydney Porter - better known to readers around the world as O. Henry - lived in Austin for nearly a decade in the 1880s and 1890s, and the Victorian cottage at 409 East 5th Street where he made his home with his wife and daughter has been preserved as one of the city's most intimate literary landmarks. The O. Henry Museum is the kind of historic house that earns its keep not through spectacle but through specificity: the preserved furnishings, personal objects, and domestic arrangements of the cottage create a genuine sense of the writer's daily life in a way that reading biographies cannot quite replicate. O. Henry's Austin years were formative ones - he worked as a draftsman, a pharmacist, a bank teller, and eventually a newspaper editor, and the stories he observed and lived in this city fed the narrative imagination that would eventually make him one of the most widely read short story writers in American literary history. His famous twist endings, his affection for the lives of ordinary people on the margins of society, his ear for vernacular speech - all of these can be traced, at least in part, to his Austin years. The museum earns a 4.6 - star rating from more than 93 visitors who have made the pilgrimage to this quiet street in what is now the heart of the Warehouse District. Admission is completely free. Open Thursday through Sunday from 12PM to 5PM, the O. Henry Museum is within easy walking distance of Austin's South Congress corridor and the Texas State Capitol. For readers, writers, and anyone curious about the human geography of a city's literary past, it is a quietly essential Austin experience.