Word: samarra
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...doing so. Last week the publication of John O'Hara's second novel made him the strongest candidate among U. S. novelists for the part that Fitzgerald has vacated by growing out of the ranks of the young. A more impressive and ambitious volume than Appointment in Samarra, his first novel, Butter field 8 suggests that John O'Hara is well on his way to becoming the voice of the hangover generation that awakened in the grey dawn of 1930. Writing principally of speakeasy, country-club, fairly well-to-do crowds similar to those Fitzgerald wrote about...
...qualifying himself for hard-boiled champion of the year. As straight a reporter of U. S. dialect as the late great Ring Lardner and straighter than Hemingway, he writes without bitterness, without pity. The effect is unpleasant but cruelly true to U. S. life. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra (TIME, Aug. 20), offended many a reader, excited many a critic. This collection of sketches and short stories will raise the same echo...
...rate, a favorite one with modern novelists: Joyce has used it. Whole books have been written by his imitators (Mr. Aiken, for example) in which the principal character hardly gets a chance to live, so busy is he kept recalling childhood experiences. Mr. O'Hara, in Appointment in Samarra, has employed this technical device to explain the temperament of his hero, Julien English. And here is Victoria Lincoln, following along in what is, by now, a well worn path. Her novel would have suffered little by the omission of Vergil Harris' reveries. I do not contest the truth...
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA-John O'Hara-Harcourt, Brace...
...stories to The New Yorker, Scrib- ner's, Vanity Fair. "In addition," he says, "I have jerked soda, worked on two railroads and in a steel mill, on an ocean liner and a farm . . . bummed east and west, was a day laborer. I was married once. ..." Appointment in Samarra is his first novel. A volume of his short stories, The Doctor's Son, will be published this autumn...