Writing with equal insight about New York City, Hollywood, and the small-town Pennsylvania world where he grew up, John O'Hara cultivated an unsentimental and often unsparing realism, aiming, he said, "to record the way people talked and thought and felt . . . with complete honesty." Praised by contemporaries including Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, he wrote about sex, drinking, and social class with a frankness ahead of its time. The fiction he published in The New Yorker (more than any other writer to this day) came to epitomize the kind of short story featured in that magazine, and his impeccable ear and skillful dialogue have influenced later writers such as Raymond Carver. Bringing together sixty stories written over four decades-the largest, most comprehensive collection of O'Hara's stories ever published-former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath presents a fresh and arresting new perspective on one of American literature's master storytellers.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Über den Autor John O'Hara
![]()
John O'Hara was born in Pennsylvania on 31 January 1905. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), won him instant acclaim, and he quickly came to be regarded as one of the most prominent writers in America. He won the National Book Award for his novel Ten North Frederick and had more stories published in the New Yorker than anyone in the history of the magazine. His fourteen novels include A Rage to Live, Pal Joey, BUtterfield 8 and From the Terrace. John O'Hara died on 11 April 1970.
