The American novelist and short-story writer John O'Hara (1905-1970) had an extraordinary ability to reproduce the look and sound of contemporary America. John O'Hara was born on Jan. 31, 1905, in Pottsville, Pa., the eldest of eight children. He was...

John O'Hara claimed to be the hardest working author in the United States, and one of his biographers, Matthew J. Bruccoli, believes that "O'Hara published more words than any other major writer of the century." In fact, few-even those who denigrated...

John O'Hara claimed to be the hardest working author in the United States, and one of his biographers, Matthew J. Bruccoli, believes that "O'Hara published more words than any other major writer of the century." In fact, few--even those who denigrated...

A Daily News poll has Mike Bloomberg bettering Rudy Giuliani as a mayor and as a presidential candidate. Mike Bloomberg denies and flirts with the idea of a presidential run. Sen. Chuck Hagel told Face the Nation that Bloomberg “should seriously think” about...

In the mid-1980's, someone asked the late Thomas Flanagan if he'd he read Erica Jong's last novel. "I definitely hope so," he replied.He was a man of lightning wit and great learning. His first novel, The Year of the French (1979), won a National Book...

In Paris, "Bar Americain" means a place that serves liquor as well as wine and beer. So the first thing that catches your eye when you walk into celebrity chef Bobby Flay's new restaurant is the enormous zinc bar, smack in the center of the...

America’s young drivers are a problem as old as the Christmas gift of a new La Salle given to an entitled tyke in Appointment in Samarra. “The kids knew he was going to get it all along,” John O’Hara wrote. “His mother told him beforehand....

[O'Hara's work is] a fiction of social absurdity. For O'Hara's fiction was deeply consistent with the man, as it must be: it is a materialistic fiction, built on the patent solidity of society, the weight of things, the detailed appurtenances of possession, the measure and symbolic value of goods. O'Hara, in correspondence with Fitzgerald, once noted that they were both parvenu authors, and it is of course to the parvenu that social substance is most substantial, class and...

[John O'Hara] was concerned mainly with depicting manners and customs in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis, Lardner, and Fitzgerald. (p. 279) [The stories of Pal Joey, with] their malapropisms, bad grammar and spelling, and slang,… would seem to derive most immediately from Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al. Joey, although perhaps somewhat more sophisticated, possesses much the same quality of egotism, vulgarity, brashness, and naïveté, despite a certain shrewdness in small thin...

"Selected Letters of John O'Hara" … cannot but sweeten the reputation of a notoriously irascible and hypersensitive author. (p. 200) These letters, even when they scold and complain, turn outward, toward the social envelope. Though he strikes an egotistical pose, it is hard to think of another significant twentieth-century fiction writer who was less of an egoist, less of an autobiographical self-celebrator. His interest in other people and their lives is so unfeignedly keen that...