The Novellas Of John O Hara

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.

22 stories chosen from John O'Hara's first nine volumes 1935-1966 by Albert Erskine and others.

'O'Hara is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust' The New York Times When the beautiful, imperious and moneyed Grace Caldwell Tate wants something she goes after it, men included. Her affair scandalises Pennsylvania's elite and she must face the costs to her marriage and the man she really loves. A bestseller on publication in 1949, A Rage to Live is a candid tale of idealists and libertines, tradesmen and crusaders, men of violence and goodwill, and women of fierce strength and tenderness.

Ketubot Part IV

On the sound stage and the casting couch, behind the facades of Spanish style mansions and inside studio trailers, at costumes and makeup, in posh nightclubs and in backrooms filled with cigar smoke, here are the ruthless producers, over-the-hill directors, disillusioned writers, glamorously callous actresses, desperate and hungry starlets, and matinee idols with dark secrets as they are unsparingly observed by one of America's most popular masters of realism. Best known for the now-classic 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra and such blockbuster bestsellers as Ten North Frederick and Butterfield 8, in a career spanning four decades John O'Hara also published numerous story collections. Among his finest work, they highlight qualities that sold more than 15 million copies of his books in the course of his career: the snappy dialogue, the telling detail, the ironic narrative twist. Like the novels, and like the much-praised collection of John O'Hara's Gibbsville stories, also edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the selections in John O'Hara's Hollywood, many originally appearing in the New Yorker or the Saturday Evening Post, explore the materialist aspirations and sexual exploits of flawed, prodigally human characters for whom arrangements consitute a deal and compromises pass for love.