John O’Hara (1905-1970) was one of the most prominent
American writers of the twentieth century. Championed by Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, he wrote
seventeen novels, including Appointment in Samarra, his
first; BUtterfield 8, which was made into a film starring
Elizabeth Taylor; Pal Joey, which was adapted into a Broadway
musical as well as a film starring Frank Sinatra; and Ten
North Frederick, which won the National Book Award. He has had more
stories published in The New Yorker than anyone else in
the history of the magazine. Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he
lived for many years in New York and in Princeton, New Jersey,
where he died.
“You can binge on his collections, the way some people binge on Mad
Men, and for some of the same reasons.” —Lorin Stein, editor of The
Paris Review
“Don Draper is an O’Hara character if ever there was one. . . . The
stories have the tang of genuine observation and reporting. . . .
You’re aware of how brilliantly O’Hara uses dialogue to convey
exposition, and of how often his people, like Hemingway’s, leave
unsaid what is really on their minds. . . . O’Hara [was] a master
of the short story . . . The New York anthology . . . is part of a
welcome Penguin effort to reissue his work in paperback.” —Charles
McGrath, The New York Times Book Review
“An author I love is John O’Hara. . . . I think he’s been forgotten
by time, but for dialogue lovers, he’s a goldmine of inspiration.”
—Douglas Coupland, Shelf Awareness
"Among the greatest short-story writers in English, or in any other
language... [He helped] to invent what the world came to call
The New Yorker short story." —Brendan Gill, Here at The New
Yorker
"O'Hara occupies a unique position in our contemporary
literature.... He is the only American writer to whom America
presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented
itself to Henry James, or France to Proust." —Lionel Trilling,
The New York Times
"This is fiction, but it has, for me, the clang of truth." —John
Updike
“O’Hara’s eyes and ears have been spared nothing.” —Dorothy
Parker
“A writer of dream-sharp tales, crisp yet dense.” —Los Angeles
Times
“O’Hara practices the classic form of the modern short story
developed by Joyce and perfected by Hemingway. . . . His coverage
is worthy of a Balzac.” —E. L. Doctorow, from the Foreword
“Superb . . . The 32 stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of
taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons. . . .
Undoubtedly, between the 1930s and the 1970s, [O’Hara] was American
fiction’s greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and
tone of all strata of midcentury society. . . . What elevates
O’Hara above slice-of-life portraitists like Damon Runyon and Ring
Lardner is the turmoil glimpsed beneath the vibrant surfaces.” —The
Wall Street Journal
“His short stories are gorgeous broken scenes of American life . .
. and his style and themes—a bridge, if you will, between F. Scott
Fitzgerald and John Updike—remain painfully and beautifully
relevant today.” —Huffington Post
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