John O'Hara

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With Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8, John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was an American writer who gained his early literary success with short stories and became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30.

His work stands out among contemporaries' for its unvarnished realism.

Though O'Hara's career as a writer is disputed, his followers place him highly among the twentieth century's most underappreciated and unjustly dismissed major American writers.

Any college students educated following O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, mainly because he refused to have his work reprinted in anthologies used to teach literature at the college level. "O'Hara may not have been the best story writer of the twentieth century, but he is the most addictive," wrote Lorin Stein, editor-in-chief of the Paris Review, in a 2013 tribute to O'Hara's work.

"You should binge on his collections the way some people binge on Mad Men," Stein said, as well as other reasons.

"Class, sex, and alcohol, for example, were all topics that mattered to him—his books contributed to a little-known history of American life." In the 1950s and 1960s, five of O'Hara's works were turned into hit films.

However, O'Hara's literary fame was harmed by his corpulent and easily bruised ego, alcoholism, long-held grievances, and political centrist views during his lifetime.

According to John Updike, a fan of O'Hara's books, the prolific author "out-produced our appreciation; now we can sit and marvel at him all over again."

Early life and education

O'Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, to an affluent Irish-American family. Though his family lived in eastern Pennsylvania during his youth, O'Hara's Irish-Catholic upbringing gave him the perspective of an outsider in WASP life, which he returned to in his writing again and again. He attended secondary school Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New York, where he was ranked Class Poet for Class 1924. His father died around the time, leaving him unable to attend Yale, the college of his dreams. This change in social status from a wealthy doctor's family's life (including hunting and dance lessons, fancy cars in the barn, domestic servants in the house) to overnight insolvency afflicted O'Hara's life, raising the issue of socioeconomic class stigma that characterizes his profession.

O'Hara was virtually obsessed with a sense of social inferiority due to not having attended Yale, according to Brendan Gill, a New Yorker. "People used to make fun of the fact that O'Hara wanted so desperately to go to Yale, but it wasn't a joke to O'Hara." It seemed that there wasn't anything he was unaware of regarding college and prep-school issues. Someone should "start a blood bank to send a fund to send John O'Hara to Yale," Hemingway said once. O'Hara yearned for an honorary degree from Yale, so much so that he even asked the university for it. Yale was unable to honor the professor because O'Hara "asked for it," according to Gill.

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Career and reputation

O'Hara started out as a reporter for various newspapers. He began writing short stories for magazines after heading to New York City. He was also a film critic, a radio commentator, and a press agent during the early stages of his career. O'Hara wrote his first book, Appointment in Samarra, in 1934. Ernest Hemingway said, "If you want to read a book written by a man who knows exactly what he's writing about and has written it beautifully, read Appointment in Samarra." O'Hara followed Samarra with BUtterfield 8, his roman à clef based on the tragic, short life of flapper Starr Faithfull, who's mysterious death in 1931 made him a tabloid sensation. Over four decades, O'Hara has published books, novellas, films, screenplays, and more than 400 short stories, the majority of which are in The New Yorker. He served as a reporter in the Pacific theater during World War II. He wrote screenplays and more books after the war, including Ten North Frederick, for which he received the 1956 National Book Award and From the Terrace (1958), which he regarded as his "most accomplishment as a novelist." He became a newspaper columnist late in life, despite his celebrity. O'Hara wrote "a body of work of monumental dimensions" in his last decade, whose own brand of dialogue was heavily influenced by O'Hara's style. "O'Hara published six books, seven collections of short fiction, and several 137 terse and extended stories, some of whom would have credentials for a renowned reputation in the world of perfect justice that he never did not discover" Higgins said."

Many of O'Hara's stories (and later books published in the 1950s) are set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a barely fictionalized recreation of his hometown town of Pottsville, a small town in the northeastern United States' anthracite zone. At The New Yorker Wolcott Gibbs, he named Gibbsville for his colleague and frequent editor. The bulk of his other stories were set in New York or Hollywood.

O'Hara's short stories earned him his highest critical esteem. He contributed more to The New Yorker than to any other writer. He published seven volumes of stories in the first decade of his career, while still resigned from writing novels. "I had an inesworthiness to share an endless supply of short story suggestions." "No writing has ever come more naturally to me," he said. Editor Charles McGrath praises 60 of O'Hara's best stories for their "sketchlike lightness and brevity -- in which nothing particularly 'happens' in the old-fashioned sense, but in which an important loss or occurrence is revealed by implication, a sense of speed and prosperity are just what makes the best of these stories so exciting." "Irint the world's best short-story writers in English, or in some other word," Gill, who worked with O'Hara in The New Yorker, rates him "among the best short-story writers in English, or in any other language," and credits him with helping "invent what the world calls the "New Yorker short story" in the first place. "No one writes them any better than I do," O'Hara wrote in the foreword to a collection that was published four years before his death. A few more volumes of his books were published shortly after his death.

Despite his fame as a best-selling author, the bulk of O'Hara's longer work is not held in such high regard by the literary establishment. "So widespread is the literary world's skepticism against John O'Hara," critic Benjamin Schwarz and writer Christina Schwarz claimed that the inclusion of Appointment in Samarra on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language books of the twentieth century was used to ridicule the entire scheme." The endings of some of O'Hara's books and stories are clumsy, hasty conclusions. Any of O'Hara's writings are attributed to his abrasive ego and lack of patience in dealing with others, his active self-promotion, his obsession with his social standing, and the political conservative columns that he wrote late in his career. Late and middle-century feminists denigrated his books for their simplistic and non-judgmental portrayals of loose women and homosexuals, but late 20th century writers who have criticized female sexuality in frank, realistic ways. His books are seen as shallow and overly concerned with sexual appetite, drinking, and surface information at the expense of deeper meaning. Many of O'Hara's books' main characters are alcoholics who live as emotional zombies, who are anxious about drinking and inability to contemplate the human heart's in conflict with itself. "He writes not of the heart but of the glands," William Faulkner, a Nobel Prize winner from 1949, said of such writers.

O'Hara left The New Yorker in 1949 after Brendan Gill shocked literary circles with a brutally affecting review in O'Hara's long-running book A Rage to Live. Gill slammed O'Hara's book as "a formula family novel" in the third and fourth magnitude, when "writers of such staggering abundance "proclaimed it "a disaster" by an author who "adamantly intended to write nothing less than a great American novel." Gill's review, according to literary commentators, was a "savage attack" and a "cruel hatchet job" on one of New York City's most popular writers. "O'Hara had been the New Yorker's Most Popular writer of stories over the past two decades" (no fewer than 197 by one count). Since publishing Gill's article, O'Hara stopped writing for The New Yorker for more than a decade, and when readers chastised Gill for sending O'Hara away, Gill deflected blame on James Thurber, a New Yorker contributor, for igniting animosity. After the arrival of a new editor who wanted to rule out O'Hara with an olive branch, O'Hara would not resume writing for The New Yorker until the 1960s. Gill sparked his controversy over O'Hara's legacy by a decade ago, he spoke out against O'Hara, pledging to tell the truth about the book.

Many literary heavyweights, including authors Updike and Shelby Foote, have admired O'Hara's legacy. Fans adore O'Hara for his ability to portray realistic dialogue, his command of telling detail, and his keen eye for human interactions in nonverbal ways—from subtle glances to telling gestures. O'Hara, a former fiction editor and former editor of The New York Times Book Review, has described O'Hara as "one of the best listeners of American fiction" and has written an article that made people laugh, as well as how often people leave unspoken what is really on their minds." "You may have to apologize for being unable to write engaging dialogue, and yet it's the characteristic that is almost entirely lacking in British writers." O'Hara said from Ring Lardner's "that if you write down speech as it is spoken properly."

According to biographer Frank MacShane, Hemingway's death made O'Hara the leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. "I really believe I will get it," O'Hara wrote to his daughter, "I can't believe I will get it" and "I hate the Nobel award... so bad I can't try it." T.S. MacShane claims that in the United States, there has been no such thing. Eliot told O'Hara that he had been nominated twice in fact. "I can think of only one other author I'd rather see get it" if John Steinbeck won the competition in 1962, O'Hara wired it. O'Hara introduced himself and Steinbeck in the pantheon of great twentieth century American writers, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, singling out Faulkner as "the one, the genius."

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