John O'Hara

The American novelist and short-story writer John O'Hara (1905-1970) had an extraordinary ability to reproduce the look and sound of contemporary America.

John O'Hara was born on Jan. 31, 1905, in Pottsville, Pa., the eldest of eight children. He was brought up as a Catholic. Expelled from Fordham Preparatory School and the Keystone State Normal School, he graduated, as class valedictorian, from the Niagara, N.Y., Preparatory School in 1924, but his father's death prevented his entering college.

For the next 10 years O'Hara worked as ship steward, railroad freight clerk, gas meter reader, amusement park guard, soda jerk, and press agent but, more importantly, as a journalist, first in Pottsville and then in New York City. He also wrote magazine pieces for Time and the New Yorker and worked briefly as a literary secretary and as a press agent.

Appointment in Samarra (1934), O'Hara's first and best novel, is the tragedy of Julian English, who initiates his own downfall by throwing a drink into the face of a social superior. A compelling study of status in Pennsylvania society, it illustrates what critic Lionel Trilling describes as O'Hara's dominant theme: "the imagination of society as some strange sentient organism which acts by laws of its own being which are not to be understood." Upon the success of the novel, O'Hara began work as a Hollywood film writer, his chief occupation until the mid-1940s.

O'Hara's association with the New Yorker, dating from 1928, is the source of his story collections. The first, The Doctor's Son and Other Stories (1935), was followed by a best-selling novel, Butterfield 8 (1935), based on a famous murder case and remarkable for its accurate nightclub-underworld argot.

A novel, Hope of Heaven (1938), and a story collection, Files on Parade (1939), were less significant than O'Hara's series of sketches collected as Pal Joey (1940). Adapted by O'Hara in 1941 for the stage, with music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, it was the season's hit.

In 1944 O'Hara worked as war correspondent for Liberty magazine. The following year his only child, his daughter Wylie, was born. After World War II O'Hara's career remained commercially successful but became critically uncertain. A Rage to Live (1949) had huge sales but mixed reviews. Ten North Frederick (1955) and From the Terrace (1958) were both best-selling novels made into movies, but Terrace received especially bad reviews.

O'Hara continued a prodigious output; in addition to two novels, Elizabeth Appleton (1963) and The Lockwood Concern (1965), seven story and novella collections appeared: Sermons and Soda Water (1960), Assembly (1961), The Cape Cod Lighter (1962), The Hat on the Bed (1963), The Horse Knows the Way (1964), And Other Stories (1968), and The O'Hara Generation (1969). He died in Princeton, N.J., on April 11, 1970.

Further Reading

Apart from reviews, O'Hara has received scant critical attention. Sheldon Norman Grebstein, John O'Hara (1966), is an excellent short critical biography.

Additional Sources

Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph, The O'Hara concern: a biography of John O'Hara, Pittsburgh, Pa.: Universtiy of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

Long, Robert Emmet, John O'Hara, New York: Ungar, 1983.

MacShane, Frank, The life of John O'Hara, New York: Dutton, 1980.

O'Hara, John, A cub tells his story, Iowa City: Windhover Press; Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Bruccoli Clark, 1974. □

O'Hara, John [Henry] (1905–70),after a journalistic career in his native Pennsylvania and in New York, began to write stories of acid observation on the country‐club set, actors, and barroom figures, collected in The Doctor's Son (1935), Files on Parade (1939), Pipe Night (1945), and Hellbox (1947). His novels are Appointment in Samarra (1934), an ironic, toughly realistic treatment of the fast country‐club set of a Pennsylvania city; Butterfield 8 (1935), based on a New York murder, revealing the sordid and sensational lives of people on the fringe of café society and the underworld; Hope of Heaven (1938), about an unhappy love affair between a scenario writer and a bookshop clerk; A Rage To Live (1949), about the tormented life of a woman who could not be faithful to the husband she really loved; The Farmers Hotel (1951), a novelette about snowbound people involved in a violent tragedy; Ten North Frederick (1955), a character study of a leading Pennsylvania citizen's public and very private life; A Family Party (1956), a novella in the form of a speech at a testimonial dinner; From the Terrace (1958), following a man through his upper‐class life during the first half of the 20th century, treating social as well as personal history; Ourselves To Know (1960), about a man who murdered his wife undetected and his life thereafter; The Big Laugh (1962), set in Hollywood in the '20s and '30s; Elizabeth Appleton (1963), portraying the married life of a society girl and a professor; The Lockwood Concern (1965), depicting the dramatic, tangled lives of four generations of an upper‐class Pennsylvania family; The Instrument (1967), about a Broadway playwright and his manipulation of people; Lovey Childs (1970), presenting a wealthy Philadelphia woman's romantic entanglements; and The Ewings (1972), treating a Cleveland lawyer's life as illustrative of the era of World War I. Pal Joey (1940) presents letters from a nightclub singer, dramatized by O'Hara and others as a musical comedy. Five Plays (1961) were all unproduced but one he had fictionized in 1951 as The Farmers Hotel. Stories are collected in Sermons and Soda‐Water (1960), Assembly (1961) The Cape Cod Lighter (1962), The Hat on the Bed (1963), The Horse Knows the Way (1964), And Other Stories (1968), The Time Element (1972), and Good Samaritan (1974). Sweet and Sour (1954) collects columns on books and authors, and selected Letters was issued in 1978.

John O'Hara 1905-70, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Pottsville, Pa. He worked at a number of jobs and ultimately became a newspaperman before the appearance of his first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934). The book, an immediate success, began O'Hara's long career as a highly commercial and popular writer. Among his other novels are Butterfield 8 (1935), Pal Joey (1940; musical comedy adaptation, 1941), A Rage to Live (1949), Ten North Frederick (1955), From the Terrace (1958), The Lockwood Concern (1965), and The Ewings (1972). O'Hara, who wove his tales around themes of class, sex, and booze, has been called a photographic, acid observer of American urban life. Some critics believe his best work is in his collections of short stories, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine; these include The Doctor's Son (1935), Hellbox (1947), Assembly (1961), The Cape Cod Lighter (1962), The Horse Knows the Way (1964), and Good Samaritan and Other Stories (1974).

Bibliography: See Selected Letters of John O'Hara (1978), ed. by M. J. Bruccoli; biographies by F. Farr (1973), M. J. Bruccoli (1975, repr. 1995), F. MacShane (1980), and G. Wolff (2003).