John OHara

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).

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.