Word: haras
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...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...
...less partisan biographer might have made more of these rampant contradictions. Yet The O'Hara Concern does show a side of the author that his posturings obscured. With remarkable discipline, O'Hara stayed on the wagon for the last 16 years of his life. He could be generous to friends and competitors (he extravagantly called Hemingway "the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare"); his letters to his daughter reveal a tenderness that few outsiders ever suspected...