From John O’Hara: Stories
In 1925, when John O’Hara was working at the Pottsville Journal (a job from which he was fired twice), he dreamed of moving to New York City and getting a job at one of the newspapers. He was particularly keen about the New York World, the home of F.P.A. (Franklin Pierce Adams), whose syndicated daily humor column, “The Conning Tower,” was eagerly read by Americans across the nation. Adams encouraged readers to submit short contributions, which he would incorporate into his column; among the writers he introduced to readers during the 1920s were Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and Robert Benchley.
Two years and several jobs later, O’Hara began submitting short pieces to Adams, many of which were bits of comic dialogue about workers ranging from bootleggers to businessmen and some of which were published. In early 1928, when O’Hara, now 23 years old, went job-hunting in Manhattan and introduced himself to Adams. The two men talked while Adams was finishing up his latest column. O’Hara was looking for work; since there was nothing available at the World, Adams called Julian Mason at the New York Post. O’Hara’s description of their meeting, sent shortly afterward in a letter to a friend, could have easily appeared in an F.P.A. column:
His Side of the Conversation
“Julian? this is Frank Adams. Say Julian I’m sending a boy down to you and I want you to put him on, hear? He’s probably better than anyone you have there now anyway . . . Oh, a perfect gentleman . . . Can he write? What a question! Very well, three-thirty. Thanks.” Then he turned to me and described Mason: Yale, about 40 and inclined to be snobbish but a good fellow really. So he asked me more questions: where do I send my stuff? Where is Pottsville? Had I tried the New Yorker? What? Oh, hell! (every other word is damn or hell) I’ll talk to Harold Ross. Don’t worry. I’ll get you somewhere. Now get the hell out of here and come back Monday. I’ll see Ross tomorrow and Sunday. . . .
Adams ended up finding a job for him at the Herald-Tribune and, armed with Adams’s backing, O’Hara began submitting pieces to Harold Ross at The New Yorker. The newspaper job lasted less than six months; O’Hara was fired for repeated lateness and drunkenness on the job. His association with The New Yorker, however, was far more enduring: over the next four decades, he published more than 400 items in the magazine (including nearly 230 short stories, a record).
His forty-third piece, “On His Hands,” was the first story he later considered of sufficient quality to include in one of his many books, and we have reprinted it as our Story of the Week selection, with an introduction describing those drunken, penniless years before he became a best-selling author.
