Word: samarra
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...socially insecure O'Hara would worry about the rest of his life), he landed a job with the Herald Tribune almost immediately, and soon began contributing to the New Yorker. In 1934, after one divorce and a string of lost newspaper jobs, O'Hara's first novel, Appointment in Samarra, appeared. The story of Julian English, a well-to-do Cadillac dealer in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pa., whose life collapses over one Christmas vacation, launched O'Hara on an extended and profitable career in writing fiction...
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...
Thus O'Hara lost touch with his best self-the outsider, permitted far enough inside various closed, interesting worlds to observe them acutely but not so far in that he made any special commitments to their inhabitants. His first great success had been 1934's Appointment in Samarra, a savage little study of how a few careless social gestures could destroy a pillar of smalltown, upper-middle-class WASP society. O'Hara knew that world well, but was not truly of it, being Irish and Catholic and the son of a man desperately insecure about his social...
...Broken Clown. In his film adaptation, Luchino Visconti (The Damned) pays his utmost disrespect to the original by maintaining Mann's fustian and removing his intention. In the novella, the aging Author-Philosopher Gustave Aschenbach seeks renewal in Venice. But like the fugitive with an appointment in Samarra, he finds death awaiting him. An elusive and beautiful youth, Tadzio, attracts the writer. Though he never touches his beloved, never even speaks to him. Aschenbach is rendered immobile by his platonic affair. A plague of cholera racks the city. At any time the writer is free to leave...
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...