Selected Short Stories Of John O Hara

These are the stories, unavailable for some years and still amazingly fresh and arresting, that influenced a whole generation of short-story writers, not one of whom capped O'Hara's mastery of the genre. The selection includes: the "Pennsylvania stories" which describe the men and women in the countryside where O'Hara grew up; the "Hollywood stories" that show that fabled land in the years of its greatest glory when O'Hara was working there as a screenwriter; and the "New York stories" which come from the days when O'Hara was a familiar figure in cafe society. ISBN 0-394-54083-2 : $19.95.

Presents a selection of the author's short works, including "Too Young," 'Bread Alone," "Graven Image," and "Mrs. Whitman."

"John O'Hara's fiction," wrote Lionel Trilling, "is preeminent for its social verisimilitude." Made famous by his bestselling novels, including BUtterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarra, O'Hara (1905-1970) also wrote some of the finest short fiction of the twentieth century. First published by the Modern Library in 1956, Selected Short Stories of John O'Hara displays the author's skills as a keen social observer, a refreshingly frank storyteller, and a writer with a brilliant ear for dialogue. "The stories in this volume," writes Louis Begley in his new Introduction, "show the wide range of [O'Hara's] interests and an ability to treat with a virtuoso's ease characters and situations from any place on America's geographic and social spectrum."

Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker) Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the twentieth century’s definitive chroniclers of the city—the speakeasies and highballs, social climbers and cinema stars, mistresses and powerbrokers, unsparingly observed by a popular American master of realism. Spanning his four-decade career, these more than thirty refreshingly frank, sparely written stories are among John O’Hara’s finest work, exploring the materialist aspirations and sexual exploits of flawed, prodigally human characters and showcasing the snappy dialogue, telling details and ironic narrative twists that made him the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Writing with equal insight about New York City, Hollywood, and the small-town Pennsylvania world where he grew up, John O’Hara cultivated an unsentimental and often unsparing realism, aiming, he said, “to record the way people talked and thought and felt . . . with complete honesty.” Praised by contemporaries including Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, he wrote about sex, drinking, and social class with a frankness ahead of its time. The fiction he published in The New Yorker (more than any other writer to this day) came to epitomize the kind of short story featured in that magazine, and his impeccable ear and skillful dialogue have influenced later writers such as Raymond Carver. Bringing together sixty stories written over four decades—the largest, most comprehensive collection of O’Hara’s stories ever published—former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath presents a fresh and arresting new perspective on one of American literature’s master storytellers. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.