Word: samarra
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Meet the People. That is the whole story of A Rage to Live, John Henry O'Hara's new novel, his first in eleven years. But it is not O'Hara's whole intent. Like his earlier taut and febrile novels (Appointment in Samarra, Butterfield 8), A Rage to Live is shot through with enough gratuitous sex to get itself talked about. But unlike them it attempts the kind of large-scale social portraiture which could easily be the framework of the Great American Novel. Rage is not that. Its wide-lensed look at U.S. small...
Appointment in Samarra. In Ostia, Italy, Dino Alfani, drowsing in peace on the Castel Fusano beach, was run over by a two-seater sport plane and suffered a fractured skull...
...ultimately dispiriting quality of O'Hara's writing has been variously explained. One explanation: since his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, he has worked out a kind of ring technique for polishing off his subjects in one fast round. Subjects on which he might have to go the distance are not taken on; such subjects include whatever, if anything, O'Hara may love...
...sparkle of this literary Fourth of July was as spent as a dead rocket. To an inquiring Briton, an American would have to reply: the outstanding U.S. novelists are John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls), and John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra). Protest had turned into corrosive petulance or special pleading for the Left. Frustration had replaced anger. No U.S. writer saw U.S. life whole; and even the scrap he saw, he usually saw over the rim of a cocktail glass. The belief grew that U.S. novelists could not write novels...
Born. To John O'Hara, 40, writer of idiomatic, bitter-patter stories of U.S. life (Appointment in Samarra, Pal Joey), and his second wife, Belle Wylie O'Hara, 32: their first child, a daughter; in Manhattan. Name: Wylie. Weight...