Word: hara
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Other critics scoffed at his almost obsessive preoccupation with the rich, disregarding the brilliant portraits of the poor and classless that stud his novels. "I want to get it all down on paper while I can," O'Hara once wrote. "The United States in this century is what I know, and it is my business to write about it to the best of my ability, with the sometimes special knowledge I have. I want to record the way people talked and thought and felt and to do it with complete honesty and variety...
Telling the Truth. He never got it all down, of course, but he went a long way toward capturing on paper those eternal preoccupations of mankind: loving, living and dying. Once, asked how he would sum himself up, O'Hara replied: "Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the 20th century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well...
...Hara was born in Pottsville, Pa., five years after the century began, the son of a prosperous doctor. His childhood was comfortable. He seemed destined for Yale and a happily-ever-after life, but just before he was to go to New Haven his father died and there was no money for college. O'Hara went on to a spectacularly varied assortment of jobs-freight clerk, steel-mill worker, soda jerk, gas-meter reader and deckhand-before turning to writing...
Never a Pet. Appointment in Samarra, recounting the last days of Julian English, a doomed young member of the upper middle class, was a great success. O'Hara's career was truly launched. Novels like Butterfield 8, A Rage to Live and From the Terrace flowed from his restless typewriter. In 1940 he wrote the libretto for Pal Joey, an instant Broadway sensation. Though he got the National Book Award, he never won either the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize, to his unconcealed annoyance. "It used to hurt, never winning an award, but I've never been...
...Best. O'Hara had little patience with writers of the '60s; he was of an earlier era, a contemporary of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis. "I've never been able to read Norman Mailer," he complained in 1967. "Mailer is a dirty Saroyan." Bernard Malamud and William Styron received the same short shrift. Most young writers, however, confess to at least a degree of admiration for O'Hara. "He has more genius than talent," John Updike wrote in 1966. "Very little censoring went on in his head, but his best stories have the flowing...