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John O'Hara: Stories

Sixty stories and novellas in all More

Edited by Charles McGrath

“He gave people like me a sense of a larger America. He got inside the political back rooms and the parlors and told us what Americans said, how they lived, the details of the clothing, the shoes, the cars.”—Gay Talese

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News A reading list for “the most deadly pandemic in human history”
June 1, 2020

Interviews John O’Hara in the 1930s: “he habitually told Americans the truth about themselves”
February 15, 2019

Story of the Week John O’Hara, “Joey on the Cake Line”
December 27, 2018

“He told the truth about his time,” reads the epitaph on John O’Hara’s gravestone. “He wrote honestly and well.” O’Hara sought in his fiction to capture experience without pretension or literary affectation. A modernist like his contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald, he drew on the plainspoken directness of the American vernacular to fashion a sharp-edged, urbane mode of storytelling distinctly his own—forthright, attentive to the smallest detail, unsentimental but powerfully sympathetic. Offering a fresh perspective on O’Hara’s brilliance as a short-story writer, editor Charles McGrath has chosen sixty stories in a selection that spans the entire remarkable career of one of twentieth-century America’s greatest social chroniclers.

The oldest son of a well-to-do Irish Catholic doctor, O’Hara was born and raised in Pottsville, the small city at the center of eastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. Renamed “Gibbsville” after his friend the writer Wolcott Gibbs, the city and surrounding countryside provided a rich storehouse of material for O’Hara’s fiction. Like William Faulkner and William Kennedy, he was keenly alert to the particularities of his home region and to the manifold ways that locale shapes human behavior. The Pennsylvania setting is the backdrop for one of his most enduring stories, “The Doctor’s Son”—a long tale with roots in O’Hara’s own childhood that stands, along with Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” as one of the most powerful literary treatments of the devastating 1918 flu pandemic in America—as well as “Imagine Kissing Pete,” a novella that follows a tumultuous marriage through its surprising twists and turns, and the poignant story placed last in this volume, “Christmas Poem.”

The Gibbsville stories included here are joined by sketches, tales, and novellas that unfold in more glittering settings: Manhattan in the years following the repeal of Prohibition, and Hollywood, where O’Hara worked fitfully as a screenwriter. Often conveying the follies and illusions of worldly sophisticates never very far from their next drink, these stories offer a larger, more searching picture of American life, a Balzacian account of people from every station struggling with thwarted hopes and unresolved disappointments. O’Hara’s own sense of himself as a literary outsider, despite his success, enabled him to dissect the intricacies of class in America with singular insight. As Charles McGrath writes: “He knew, probably better than any other American writer, about social class in this country: about all the subtle markers and distinctions used to indicate rungs in the hierarchy, and about how rigid and how fragile the system is, a maze of envy, snobbery, and insecurity.”

This revelatory collection is accompanied, for the first time, by extensive notes clarifying O’Hara’s many allusions to music, movies, fashion, and topical events, as well as a concise chronology providing crucial biographical context for many of the stories.

Charles McGrath, editor, is a writer at large at The New York Times, and was formerly editor of The New York Times Book Review and deputy editor of The New Yorker.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News A reading list for “the most deadly pandemic in human history”
June 1, 2020

Interviews John O’Hara in the 1930s: “he habitually told Americans the truth about themselves”
February 15, 2019

Story of the Week John O’Hara, “Joey on the Cake Line”
December 27, 2018

Story of the Week John O’Hara, “Christmas Poem”
December 22, 2016

Interviews John O’Hara: “an important American writer who has been unjustly neglected”
September 23, 2016
Table of Contents

On His Hands
Early Afternoon
It Must Have Been Spring
Over the River and Through the Wood
The Doctor’s Son
Price’s Always Open
Are We Leaving Tomorrow?
The Cold House
Trouble in 1949
Do You Like It Here?
Too Young
Bread Alone
The King of the Desert
Summer’s Day
Graven Image
The Next-to-Last Dance of the Season
The Pretty Daughters
Common Sense Should Tell You
Ellie
The Moccasins
A Phase of Life
Time to Go
Encounter: 1943
The Heart of Lee W. Lee
The War
The Time Element
Family Evening
Requiescat
Imagine Kissing Pete
Call Me, Call Me
Mrs. Stratton of Oak Knoll
You Can Always Tell Newark
In the Silence
Winter Dance
Appearances
Your Fah Neefah Neeface
Justice
The Lesson
Pat Collins
Agatha
Exterior: with Figure
The Flatted Saxophone
The Man on the Tractor
At the Window
The Answer Depends
Can I Stay Here?
I Spend My Days in Longing
I Can’t Thank You Enough
In the Mist
Afternoon Waltz
The Assistant
Fatimas and Kisses
Natica Jackson
How Old, How Young
The Farmer
We’ll Have Fun
The Sun Room
A Man To Be Trusted
The Journey to Mount Clemens
Christmas Poem

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-497-9 860 pages

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N° 282 Library of America Series

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