Word: samarra
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...regeneration by a bad shock. But Revelry By Night is fluently readable, at times masterfully comic, and-for a first novel-a surprisingly deft study of a way of life that seems doomed to perish, as those in The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby and Appointment in Samarra already have...
Perhaps John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra) could polish off the script. But though characters in O'Hara novels sometimes refer to each other as "Fitzgerald characters," O'Hara is more a Hemingway derivative, belongs less among the sad young men than with U. S. Literature's dead-end kids : James M. Cain ( The Postman Always Rings Twice), Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), pseudonymous Richard Hallas (real name Eric Knight...
Though he has neither Lardner's indescribable humor nor Hemingway's Paris-found sense of style, John O'Hara ranks with them as a first-class, far from phoney reporter. Appointment in Samarra, his first and best novel, was good enough and true enough to make anything he wrote thereafter worth reading. Probably most worth reading are his acid short stories...
John O'Hara's first two novels impressed critics for two reasons. They revealed his command of native dialect and his willingness to enter into the minds of recognizable U. S. types to see what made them tick. Thus, in Appointment in Samarra, he explored the consciousness of a Pennsylvania Cadillac dealer who committed suicide; in Butter field 8, the crossed-up life of a New York speakeasy girl who had better reasons for letting herself...
Married. Novelist John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra, Butter field 8); and Belle Wylie, Manhattan socialite; in Elkton...