Word: hara
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...Hara worked hard at his craft. He retained a keen interest in current slang, and the 1972 supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary credits him as the source of 11 words, including the now familiar "fuck-up." He was particularly concerned with the visual composition of the printed paragraph. As a young writer, he spent hours over A Farewell to Arms, using Hemingway's paragraphing as a model for his own work...
...Hara began to fear that he would be "remembered as a short story writer, if at all." He was aware of the irony; he considered himself a novelist first, and regarded his shorter fiction only as a profitable distraction. He own attempts to secure lasting recognition had taken the form of a series of overblown novels, most of them well over 400 pages long...
...even a partisan like Bruccoli will admit that O'Hara's novels never quite measure up to his short stories. He had matured as a short story writer. By the 1960's, the early wandering sketches he had published in the New Yorker had gradually evolved into well-plotted and elegant short stories. If, as Norman Mailer (another Nobel-chaser) once wrote, the real short story writer is a jeweler, then O'Hara's best short fiction has the brilliance of carefully polished jewelry. O'Hara's later short story style depends on a clean, taut prose that unobtrusively serves...
Like Tony Costello, O'Hara felt he had gained a complete mastery over his own craft. "I saw and felt and heard the world around me and within my limitations and within my prejudices, I wrote down what I saw and felt and heard," he said in an interview. "I tried to keep it mine and where I was most successful it was mine...
...John O'Hara is rarely included in reading lists of American literature courses, nor do graduate students burn to write dissertations on him. But Bruccoli's biography is the first step in the right direction. O'Hara deserves more attention. He was not the best of those who wrote about his time, but no one could deny that he was a professional, or that he wrote honestly and well...