John O'Hara
John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was an American writer. He earned a reputation first for short stories and became a best-selling novelist by age thirty with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8.. He was particularly known for an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue. O'Hara was a keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently about the socially ambitious.
A controversial figure, O'Hara had a reputation for personal irascibility and for cataloging social ephemera, both of which frequently overshadowed his gifts as a storyteller. Writer Fran Lebowitz called him "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald." John Updike, one of his consistent supporters, grouped him with Chekhov in a C-SPAN interview. By contrast, Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times dismissed him as "a well-known lout."
Read more about John O'Hara: Life, Columns, Adaptations
Famous quotes containing the word john:
“And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)