A short life of the author
John Henry O’Hara (31 January 1905 – 11 April 1970) was an American novelist and short story writer whose vast body of fiction — fourteen novels, over four hundred short stories, novellas, and plays — constitutes one of the most exhaustive and precise portraits of American social life in the twentieth century. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), is a masterpiece of American realism. His short stories, most of them published in The New Yorker, are among the finest ever written in the English language. His ear for dialogue — for the exact way Americans of different classes, regions, and professions actually speak — was unmatched by any writer of his generation. And yet O’Hara’s reputation has declined more sharply than almost any major American writer’s, for reasons that say as much about literary fashion as they do about the quality of his work.
Life
O’Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania — a small coal-region city that he fictionalised as “Gibbsville” and used as the setting for much of his best fiction. His father was a prosperous Irish-American doctor; the family was well-off but not quite upper-class in the rigidly stratified society of small-city Pennsylvania. When his father died in 1925, the family’s financial position collapsed, and O’Hara — who had been expected to attend Yale — was unable to go to college. This deprivation shaped his life and his fiction: he was obsessed with social class, with the markers of status (clubs, schools, cars, accents), and with the pain of exclusion. He wanted to be accepted by the American upper class, and he wrote about that class with the clinical precision of an outsider who has studied every detail.
He moved to New York and became a journalist and then a fiction writer, publishing his first novel at twenty-nine. He was a heavy drinker, a combative personality, and a man of enormous literary ambition who openly campaigned for the Nobel Prize (he was never awarded it, a failure that embittered his later years).
Appointment in Samarra (1934)
O’Hara’s masterpiece tells the story of Julian English, a prosperous young car dealer in Gibbsville who, over the course of three days during Christmas 1930, destroys his marriage, his social standing, and his life through a series of impulsive, self-destructive acts — beginning with throwing a drink in the face of a socially powerful man at a country club. The novel is a study of the way social transgression operates in a small, hierarchical community: one wrong move sets in motion a chain of consequences that cannot be reversed.
Faulkner called it one of the best three novels ever written by an American. Ernest Hemingway praised its precision. The novel’s economy — it covers only three days — and its relentless forward momentum make it one of the most perfectly constructed American novels of the interwar period.
The Short Stories
O’Hara published more stories in The New Yorker than any other writer. His stories are characterised by their surface simplicity — they often seem to be merely recording a conversation, a social encounter, a moment in a relationship — and by the devastating revelations that emerge from what is said, what is not said, and how it is said. He is the master of dialogue that simultaneously reveals character, class position, and emotional truth.
In the late 1960s, O’Hara produced a series of long novellas — collected in Sermons and Soda-Water (1960), The Cape Cod Lighter (1962), and subsequent volumes — that are among his finest achievements: sustained narrative performances that use their length to develop character and situation with extraordinary patience and depth.
Critical Decline and Reassessment
O’Hara’s reputation collapsed after his death for several reasons: his novels grew longer and more diffuse in his later years; his social conservatism put him out of step with the literary culture of the 1960s and 1970s; and his obsession with social minutiae — the makes of cars, the names of clubs, the details of dress — seemed superficial to critics who valued psychological depth over sociological precision. The critical case against O’Hara is that he was a social reporter rather than an artist.
The case for O’Hara is that his best work — Appointment in Samarra, the short stories, the novellas — is as good as anything written by his contemporaries, and that his social precision is not superficial but is itself a form of psychological insight.
Collecting O’Hara
Appointment in Samarra (1934, Harcourt, Brace) in first edition with dust jacket brings $1,000–$4,000. BUtterfield 8 (1935) brings $200–$500. Pal Joey (1940) brings $100–$300. The later novels and story collections are widely available. Signed copies are uncommon — O’Hara was not a regular signer — and command premiums.