Roads of Destiny, which was first published in 1909, is a collection of Twenty-Two short stories written by the the popular American author O' Henry. "Roads of Destiny," one of the short stories, was adapted in a 1921 American silent drama film produced and distributed by Goldwyn Pictures. It was turned into a play by Channing Pollock starring Florence Reed and directed by Frank Lloyd. "The Cop and the Anthem" about a New York City hobo named Soapy, who sets out to get arrested so that he can be a guest of the city jail instead of sleeping out in the cold winter. "A Retrieved Reformation," the story of a safecracker, was adapted into a radio series- Alias Jimmy Valentine and was broadcast from 1938 to 1939. It describes the events, which lead up to the reformation of an ex-convict, Valentine. The dramatist Paul Armstrong adapted this story into a highly successful Broadway play under the title Alias Jimmy Valentine in 1910 which ran 155 performances at Wallack's Theatre in New York. The play was subsequently made into three film versions. "The Gift of the Magi" was initially published in The New York Sunday World under the title "Gifts of the Magi" on December 10, 1905. It was first published in book form in the O. Henry Anthology, 'The Four Million', in April 1906. In 1952 Marilyn Monroe and Charles Laughton starred in O. Henry's Full House, a film featuring five stories of O. Henry's short stories. The film included The Cop and the Anthem and four other O. Henry stories: The Clarion Call, The Last Leaf, The Ransom of Red Chief (starring Fred Allen and Oscar Levant), and The Gift of the Magi. William Sidney Porter (O Henry) was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He changed the spelling of his middle name to Sydney in 1898. His parents were Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter and Mary Jane Virginia Swaim Porter. When he was three his mother died from tuberculosis and he with his father moved into the home of his paternal grandmother. He enrolled at the Lindsey Street High School and his aunt continued to tutor him until he was fifteen. In 1879, he started working in his uncle's drugstore and in 1881, at the age of nineteen; he was licensed as a pharmacist. Porter traveled with Dr. James K. Hall to Texas in March 1882, hoping that a change of air would help alleviate a persistent cough he had developed- while there on the ranch, he learned bits of Spanish and German from the mix of immigrant ranch hands. Porter met Athol Estes in a musical theater group and began courting the seventeen years old girl whom he married in July 1887. Athol gave birth to a son in 1888, who died hours after birth, and then a daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, in September 1889. Porter's friend Richard Hall became Texas Land Commissioner and offered Porter a job. Porter started as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office in 1887 at a monthly salary of $100, and the same year, he began working at the First National Bank of Austin as a teller and bookkeeper. At the bank, federal indictment for embezzlement of money followed and he ran away and holed up in a Trujillo hotel in Honduras. Here he wrote Cabbages and Kings in which he coined the term "banana republic" to qualify the country, a phrase subsequently used widely to describe a small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America with a narrowly focused, agrarian economy. Athol Estes Porter died from tuberculosis on July 25, 1897. Porter returned to America and had little to say in his own defense, and was found guilty of embezzlement in February 1898, sentenced to five years in prison, and imprisoned on March 25, 1898 at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. Porter was a heavy drinker, and by 1908 his markedly deteriorating health affected his writing. In 1909, Sarah left him, and he died on June 5, 1910, of cirrhosis of the liver, complications of diabetes, and an enlarged heart.