John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was an American writer. He 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. 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. 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.
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 to elite WASP society, a theme he wrote of again and again. 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 Yale, the college of his dreams, and he fell overnight from the privileged life of a well-heeled doctor's family, including club memberships, riding and dance lessons, fancy cars in the barn, and domestic servants in the house. By all accounts, this social fall 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 John O'Hara to Yale." As his literary acclaim grew, O'Hara yearned for an honorary degree from Yale, but never received it. According to Gill, the college was unwilling to award the honor precisely because O'Hara had obstreperously "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. In 1934, O'Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra. 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. 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. "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."
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 complained that his numerous short stories 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." Gill, who worked with O'Hara at the New Yorker, ranks him "among the greatest short-story writers in English, or in any other language" and credits him with helping "to invent what the world came to call the New Yorker short story." In the foreword to a collection published four years before his death, O'Hara declared, "No one writes them any better than I do." Two more volumes of his stories were published soon after his death.
Despite his success as a best-selling author, most of O'Hara's longer work is not held in as high regard by the literary establishment. Critic Benjamin Schwarz and writer Christina Schwarz claimed: "So widespread is the literary world's scorn for John O'Hara that the inclusion of Appointment in Samarra on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century was used to ridicule the entire project." Some of O'Hara's novels and stories are tied off with clumsy, abrupt endings. Some of the harsh literary criticism is attributed to personal dislike of O'Hara's abrasive ego and arrogant manner, his vigorous self-promotion, his obsession with his social status, and the politically conservative columns he wrote late in his career. Early and mid-20th century critics also disparaged his novels for their blunt and non-judgmental depictions of loose women and homosexuals, but critics writing after the sexual revolution saw in O'Hara a pioneer in showing sexuality in frank, realistic ways. John Kenneth Galbraith, writing about the strict Calvinist culture of his early 20th century childhood in remote, rural Ontario, remembered, "We were taught that sexual intercourse was, under all circumstances, a sin, and we were free from the countervailing influence of movies, television and John O'Hara." O'Hara's most biting critics regard his novels as shallow and overly concerned with sexual desire, drinking and surface details at the expense of deeper meaning. Many of his leading characters are alcoholics who live as emotional zombies, anesthetized by drinking to the agony of the human heart in conflict with itself. As his contemporary William Faulkner said of such writers in his Nobel Prize address of 1949, "He writes not of the heart but of the glands."