John O'Hara

John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style.

He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8.

While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is debated, his work was praised by such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his champions rank him highly among the major under-appreciated American writers of the 20th century.

He attended the secondary school Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New York, where he was named Class Poet for Class of 1924.

His father died about that time, leaving him unable to afford to attend Yale, the college of his dreams.

By all accounts, this fall in social status from a privileged life of a well-heeled doctor's family (including club memberships, riding and dance lessons, fancy cars in the barn, domestic servants in the house) to overnight insolvency afflicted O'Hara with status anxiety for the rest of his life, honing the cutting social class awareness that characterizes his work.

Brendan Gill, who worked with O'Hara at The New Yorker, claimed that O'Hara was nearly obsessed with a sense of social inferiority due to not having attended Yale.

"People used to make fun of the fact that O'Hara wanted so desperately to have gone to Yale, but it was never a joke to O'Hara. It seemed... that there wasn't anything he didn't know about it in regard to college and prep-school matters."

Hemingway once said someone should "start a bloody fund to send up a collection to send John O'Hara to Yale."

As his literary acclaim grew, O'Hara yearned for an honorary degree from Yale, so much so that he even asked the university for it.

According to Gill, Yale was unwilling to award the honor because O'Hara "asked for it."

Initially, O'Hara worked as a reporter for various newspapers.

Moving to New York City, he began to write short stories for magazines.

During the early part of his career, he was also a film critic, a radio commentator and a press agent.

Endorsing the novel, Ernest Hemingway wrote: "If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra." O'Hara followed Samarra with BUtterfield 8, his roman à clef based upon the tragic, short life of flapper Starr Faithfull, whose mysterious death in 1931 became a tabloid sensation.

Over four decades, O'Hara published novels, novellas, plays, screenplays and more than 400 short stories, the majority of them in The New Yorker.

During World War II, he was a correspondent in the Pacific theater.

In 1934, O'Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra.

These best sellers included A Rage to Live (1949), Ten North Frederick (1955), From the Terrace (1959), Ourselves to Know (1960), Sermons and Soda Water (1960) and Elizabeth Appleton (1963).

Five of his works were adapted into popular films in the 1950s and 1960s.

Many of O'Hara's stories (and his later novels written in the 1950s) are set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a barely fictionalized version of his home town of Pottsville, a small city in the anthracite region of the northeastern United States.

He named Gibbsville for his friend and frequent editor at The New Yorker Wolcott Gibbs.

Most of his other stories were set in New York or Hollywood.

O'Hara's short stories earned him his highest critical acclaim.

He contributed more of them to The New Yorker than any other writer.

He published seven volumes of stories in the final decade of his career while complaining that they took his time away from writing novels.

"I had an apparently inexhaustible urge to express an unlimited supply of short story ideas. No writing has ever come more easily to me," he claimed.

In the Library of America's collection of 60 of O'Hara's best stories, editor Charles McGrath praises them for their "sketchlike lightness and brevity... in which nothing necessarily 'happens' in the old-fashioned sense, but in which some crucial loss or discovery is revealed just by implication... a sense of speed and economy is just what makes the best of these stories so thrilling."

After the war, he wrote screenplays and more novels, including Ten North Frederick, for which he won the 1956 National Book Award and From the Terrace (1958), which he considered his "greatest achievement as a novelist."

Late in life, with his reputation established, he became a newspaper columnist.

In his last decade, O'Hara created "a body of work of magnificent dimensions," wrote the novelist George V. Higgins, whose own trademark dialogue was influenced heavily by O'Hara's style.

Despite the popularity of these books, O'Hara accumulated detractors due to his outsized and easily bruised ego, alcoholic irascibility, long-held resentments and politically conservative views that were unfashionable in literary circles in the 1960s.

After O'Hara's death, John Updike, an admirer of O'Hara's writing, said that the prolific author "out-produced our capacity for appreciation; maybe now we can settle down and marvel at him all over again."

O'Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, to an affluent Irish American family.

Though his family lived among the gentry of eastern Pennsylvania during his childhood, O'Hara's Irish Catholic background gave him the perspective of an outsider on the inside of WASP society, a theme he returned to in his writing again and again.

"Between 1960 and 1968," Higgins noted, O'Hara "published six novels, seven collections of short fiction, and some 137 terse and extended stories that all by themselves would supply credentials for a towering reputation in the world of perfect justice that he never did quite find."

Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be 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, then editor-in-chief of The Paris Review, in a 2013 appreciation of O'Hara's work.

Stein added, "You can binge on his collections the way some people binge on Mad Men, and for some of the same reasons. On the topics of class, sex, and alcohol—that is, the topics that mattered to him—his novels amount to a secret history of American life."

O'Hara achieved substantial commercial success in the years after World War II, when his fiction repeatedly appeared in Publishers Weekly's annual list of the top ten best-selling fiction works in the United States.