Publicity photo of John O’Hara
We’ve been thinking a lot at LOA about the remarkable rise of the American short story. But what about its evolution in the twentieth century? One of the first places to look is the fiction of John O’Hara, the novelist and New Yorker staple (he published nearly 230 stories with the magazine, a record) who Fran Leibowitz once called “the real Fitzgerald” for his deft unraveling of social class in the age of Prohibition and beyond. He was born in Pottsville, PA, one hundred twenty years ago this winter.
Who was that guy that used to write about men’s clubs all the time? John O’Hara. It was Mars for me.
A cantankerous self-mythologizer, O’Hara passive-aggressively congratulated John Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize win with a note that read, “I can think of only one other author I’d rather see get it.” The inability to make nice with tastemakers, plus the sprawl of his later novels, contributed to critical neglect in his lifetime. Nonetheless, his influence echoes through more roundly lauded later writers, including John Updike, John Cheever, and J. D. Salinger. O’Hara, Updike recalled, “saw exceptionally much of the seamy, disappointed side of American life, and part of his veracity was not to melodramatize it, or to forget that the human will gleams in even the dingiest folds of the social fabric.”
John O’Hara: Stories
Charles McGrath, who edited the LOA edition of O’Hara’s stories, discusses in this interview how the writer helped rescue the popular short story from “the straitjacket of beginning, middle, and end, and often a trick or surprise end at that.” Rather, “in an O’Hara story what happens is most often an internal event—a change in mood or feeling—revealed subtly, sometimes just by implication. It’s not a stretch to compare him to Chekhov.”
Or Zola, Molière, Joyce, and other great weavers of inner life and social surface. O’Hara, Steven Goldleaf writes, understood how the seemingly superficial mores of class and standing exert a shaping pressure on Americans with a force akin to fate:
What O’Hara did was recognize that those broad groupings could be broken down further into sub-groups and sub-sub-groups and finally individuals, noting each individual’s background and influences and personality type that added up to an explanation of the ways they spoke, wrote, and thought. He was merciless in recognizing the large role that someone’s past retained into his present, and rather than excuse a verbal slip into a slightly different speech-register as an aberration, he would seize upon it as a revealing clue to that person’s underlying nature.
Scenes from Pottsville, PA, in the 1920s and ’30s. The city of O’Hara’s birth, it appeared often in his fiction under the name Gibbsville. (Public Domain)
O’Hara’s skill at bringing the unfamiliar worlds of individual characters to far-flung audiences was profoundly appreciated by another of his best readers and interpreters: Octavia E. Butler. “I tended to read whatever was in the house, which meant that I read a lot of odd stuff,” the Afrofuturist icon once told an interviewer. “Who was that guy that used to write about men’s clubs all the time? John O’Hara. It was Mars for me.”
