Word: hara
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hara Concern is intentionally biased by my conviction that John O'Hara was a major writer who was underrated by the critical-academic axis sometimes called The Literary Establishment." If such an axis existed, Bruccoli would be a card-carrying member; as a professor of English at the University of South Carolina and director of the Center for Editions of American Authors (a far-flung scholarly empire churning out overfootnoted and overpriced texts), he is a totally critical academic...
...fact, such an axis is wholly imaginary. Bruccoli's own research reveals that estimates of O'Hara's work ranged from raves to pans throughout his long career. If a conspiracy was afoot, it was singularly anarchic. What is worse, the unfriendly reviews that Bruccoli quotes are invariably more persuasive than his own dust-jacket gushings about works that are "superb," "brilliant," "powerful" and "extraordinary...
...Hara's importance needs no such inflation. His "Gibbsville" region is a worthy addition to American social geography, and his odd, tormented personality contained enough fascinating quirks for several men. "John, I'm your friend," Robert Benchley once told him, "and all your friends know you're a son of a bitch." Almost from the moment the callow young reporter reached New York in 1928, he gained notoriety as a prodigious writer, a snob and a mean drunk. He kept blacklists of friends who had offended him. One such victim was Author Budd Schulberg...
Dunce Cap. The success of Appointment in Samarra (1934) bolstered O'Hara's self-esteem without relieving an iota of his insecurity. The novelist of the future, he protested, will take "the best of James Joyce, the best of William Faulkner, the best of Sinclair Lewis, the best of Ernest Hemingway and, naturally, the best of me." Reviewers who praised him received pathetically vulnerable letters of thanks...
Awards moved him to tears. As a tormenting reminder of the college past he never had, O'Hara kept a mock Phi Beta Kappa key with a dunce cap on the top, engraved "Nope Never Made...