John O'Hara - Life

Life

O'Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. His childhood home, the John O'Hara House, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. He attended the secondary school Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New York, where he was named Class Poet for Class of 1924. His father died at that time, leaving him unable to afford Yale, the college of his choice. By all accounts, this disappointment affected O'Hara deeply for the rest of his life and served to hone the keen sense of social awareness that characterizes his work. He worked as a reporter for various newspapers. Among other things he covered his hometown Pottsville Maroons of the National Football League.

Moving to New York City, O'Hara began to write short stories for magazines. In his early days he was also a film critic, a radio commentator and a press agent; later, with his reputation established, he became a newspaper columnist. He garnered much critical acclaim for his short stories, more than 200 of which, beginning in 1928, appeared in The New Yorker. Many of them (and some later novels) were set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a barely fictionalized version of Pottsville, which is a small city in the coal region of the United States.

In 1934, O'Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, which was acclaimed on publication. This is the O'Hara novel that is most consistently praised by critics. Ernest Hemingway wrote: "If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra." Harold Bloom named it to the Western canon. On the other hand, writing in the Atlantic Monthly of March 2000, critic Benjamin Schwarz and writer Christina Schwarz claimed: "So widespread is the literary world's scorn for John O'Hara that the inclusion ... of Appointment in Samarra on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century was used to ridicule the entire project."

O'Hara followed Samarra with BUtterfield 8 and several other novels. The epistolary Pal Joey (1940) led immediately to a successful Broadway musical, and subsequently to other productions.

During World War II he was a correspondent in the Pacific theater. After the war, he wrote screenplays and more novels including Ten North Frederick, for which he won the 1956 National Book Award. But his books became increasingly wordy and his critical reputation suffered, although his shorter work was still esteemed. He was also attacked by some for his frank treatment of sexuality, which at least approached what was impermissible in the 1930s (Appointment and BUtterfield). BUtterfield 8 was banned in Australia until 1963.

Despite his obvious writing skill, most of O'Hara's longer work was not highly regarded by the literary establishment. Some of this may have been due to extra-literary factors, such as his social climbing, his vigorous self-promotion, and his politically-conservative newspaper columns. Martin Kich of Wright State University says, "O'Hara's achievements have been so long and thoroughly denigrated that he is now typically considered a novelist of the second, or even the third, rank."

Brendan Gill, who worked with him at The New Yorker, ranks him as "among the greatest short-story writers in English, or in any other language" and credits him with helping "to invent what the world came to call the New Yorker short story."

"Oh," writes Gill, "but John O'Hara was a difficult man! Indeed, there are those who would describe him as impossible, and they would have their reasons." Gill indicates that O'Hara was nearly obsessed with a sense of social inferiority due to not having attended college. "People used to make fun of the fact that O'Hara wanted so desperately to have gone to Yale, but it was never a joke to O'Hara. It seemed... that there wasn't anything he didn't know about in regard to college and prep-school matters." Of O'Hara, Hemingway once said, cruelly, "Someone should take up a collection to send John O'Hara to Yale." O'Hara also yearned for an honorary degree from Yale. According to Gill, Yale was unwilling to award the honor because O'Hara "asked for it."

According to biographer Frank MacShane, O'Hara thought that Hemingway's death made him (O'Hara) the leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote to his daughter "I really think I will get it," and "I want the Nobel prize... so bad I can taste it." MacShane says that T. S. Eliot told O'Hara that he had, in fact, been nominated twice. When Steinbeck won the prize in 1962, O'Hara wired, "Congratulations, I can think of only one other author I'd rather see get it."

John O'Hara died from cardiovascular disease in Princeton, New Jersey, and is interred there in the Princeton Cemetery. The epitaph on his tombstone, which he wrote himself, reads: "Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well." Of this, Gill commented: "From the far side of the grave, he remains self-defensive and overbearing. Better than anyone else? Not merely better than any other writer of fiction but better than any dramatist, any poet, any biographer, any historian? It is an astonishing claim."