Word: hara
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...epitaph on John O'Hara's gravestone in Princeton Cemetery reads: "Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well...
...prolific novelist, playwright and short story writer did not compose those lines specifically for his headstone, as others have somewhat snidely suggested, but O'Hara would have accepted them as a valid summation of his work. Throughout his 40 odd years on the American literary scene, O'Hara lobbied openly for the critical acclaim he felt was due him, and watched in frustration as he was passed over, time and time again, for Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Steinbeck...
This doctor's son from Pottsville, Pa. was never known for sobriety or modesty. He had reason to be confident. Although he arrived in New York in 1928 without a college education (something the socially insecure O'Hara would worry about the rest of his life), he landed a job with the Herald Tribune almost immediately, and soon began contributing to the New Yorker. In 1934, after one divorce and a string of lost newspaper jobs, O'Hara's first novel, Appointment in Samarra, appeared. The story of Julian English, a well-to-do Cadillac dealer in the fictional town...
From the start, he was certain he was destined for greatness. When the young O'Hara boasted he would be in Who's Who by the age of thirty, his father, who always disapproved of his son's recklessness, predicted that by then John would be dead. But the brash young Irishman's prophesy turned out to be correct; he was 29 when the form for Who's Who arrived. Little had changed decades later, when O'Hara wrote to Bennett Cerf at Random House: "It's no secret that I am working to get the Nobel. I am constantly...
...John O'Hara's confidence in his own abilities as a writer was never supported by reviewers or academics, before or after his death. Now, six years after his death, Matthew J. Bruccoli, professor of English at the University of South Carolina, offers a reassessment of the controversial author's work. In a critical biography called The O'Hara Concern (Random House, 417 pp., $15.00), Bruccoli argues that O'Hara must rank as one of America's best novelists and our greatest writer of short stories. In a final chapter, Bruccoli details his reasons. He lists what he considers...