The O. Henry Award is the only yearly American award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry.

The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories is an annual collection of the year's twenty best stories published in U.S. and Canadian magazines, written in English.

The award itself is called The O. Henry Award, not the O. Henry Prize, though until recently there were first, second and third prize winners; the collection is called The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and the original collection was called Prize Stories 1919: The O. Henry Memorial Awards.

The award was first presented in 1919, and is funded by the Society of Arts and Sciences. As of 2003, the series editor chooses twenty short stories, each one an O. Henry Prize story. All stories originally written in the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration. Three jurors are appointed annually. The jurors receive the twenty prize stories in manuscript form, with no identification of author or publication. Each juror, acting independently, chooses a short story of special interest and merit, and comments on that story.

William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American writer. O. Henry's short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.

William Sidney Porter was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. His middle name at birth was Sidney; he changed the spelling to Sydney in 1898. His parents were Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter (1825–1888), a physician, and Mary Jane Virginia Swaim Porter (1833–1865). They were married on April 20, 1858. When William was three, his mother died from tuberculosis, and he and his father moved into the home of his maternal grandmother. As a child, Porter was always reading, everything from classics to dime novels; his favorite works were Lane's translation of One Thousand and One Nights, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

Porter graduated from his aunt Evelina Maria Porter's elementary school in 1876. He then enrolled at the Lindsey Street High School. 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. At the drugstore, he also showed off his natural artistic talents by sketching the townsfolk.

Donald Antrim (born 1958 in Miami, Florida)^{[citation needed]} is an American novelist. His first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993. In 1999 The New Yorker named him as among the twenty best writers under the age of forty.

Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to The New Yorker and has written a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers, which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. He is also the author of The Afterlife, a 2006 memoir about his mother, Louanne Self. He has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Antrim is the brother of the artist Terry Leness and the son of Harry Antrim, a scholar of T. S. Eliot. Antrim has been associated with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and David Means.

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books. As of 2011, King has written and published 49 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, five non-fiction books, and nine collections of short stories. Many of his stories are set in his home state of Maine.

King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Society Awards, his novella The Way Station was a Nebula Award novelette nominee, and in 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his whole career, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004), the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007).

Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an award-winning American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, and playwright, whose career spans over half a century.

He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.

By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art films during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. The best-known of his over 40 films include the Academy Award-winners Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Midnight in Paris (2011); and the Golden Globe-winning The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Critic Roger Ebert has described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."