BUtterfield 8

‘More than any other American novelist, O'Hara has both reflected his times and captured the unique individual for generations to come’ LA Times

A man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well

O'Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character

O'Hara occupies a unique position...He 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

More than any other American novelist, O'Hara has both reflected his times and captured the unique individual for generations to come

John O'Hara was born in Pennsylvania on 31 January 1905. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), won him instant acclaim, and he quickly came to be regarded as one of the most prominent writers in America. He won the National Book Award for his novel Ten North Frederick and had more stories published in the New Yorker than anyone in the history of the magazine. His fourteen novels include A Rage to Live, Pal Joey, BUtterfield 8 and From the Terrace. John O'Hara died on 11 April 1970.

‘More than any other American novelist, O'Hara has both reflected his times and captured the unique individual for generations to come’ LA Times 
 
'On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who was later to be the cause of a sensation in New York awoke much too early for her night before' 
 
This particular morning Gloria finds herself alone in a stranger's apartment with nothing but a torn evening dress and her stockings and underwear. When she takes a fur coat from the wardrobe to wear home, she sets in train a series of events that will lead to tragedy. 
 
A bestseller on its first publication, BUtterfield 8 is the glittering story of a 1930s glamour girl whose ill-starred entanglement with a respectable married man is set against a backdrop of Manhattan bars and bedrooms.

Selected Stories

'This is fiction, but it has, for me, the clang of truth' John Updike

This is fiction, but it has, for me, the clang of truth

Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well

John O’Hara on John O’Hara, inscribed on his gravestone

A man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvellously well

A social realist obsessed with the peccadilloes of the upper class, but he was considered a daring writer in the Thirties and Forties, his best prose distinguished by its concision, clever dialect and sexual candor. He is credited with inventing the New Yorker short story

A writer of dream-sharp tales, crisp yet dense

John O'Hara's fiction is preeminent for its social verisimilitude

'The range of O'Hara's knowledge of how Americans live was incomparably greater than that of any other fiction writer of his time'

'This is fiction, but it has, for me, the clang of truth' John Updike 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY E. L. DOCTOROW 
 
John O’Hara is widely credited with inventing the New Yorker short story, and remains the most-published short story writer in the history of the magazine. Selected from his vast collection of short fiction written over forty years, these refreshingly frank, sparely written stories show him at his best. Exposing a world of bartenders and 'b-girls', car washers and criminals, O'Hara dissects the subtleties that bind humans together and the pressures that separate them.

A Rage to Live

'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

A fascinating character study by one of America's most underrated storytellers, but there are other rewards as well. O'Hara's dialogue is unerringly authentic and his narrative passages as graphic as a photograph

His ear for dialogue is legendary, and he evoked New York cabbies, Hollywood producers and cheap hoods like Pal Joey as easily as he did Park Avenue socialites... Few authors today write convincingly of matters involving public life and private morality - they tend to do one or the other. But O'Hara could intertwine them in a five-page sketch or an 800-page epic.

'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.

The New York Stories

‘Superb. . . These thirty-two stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons. . . O'Hara was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of mid-century society’ Wall Street Journal

You can binge on O’Hara’s collections in the way some people binge on Mad Men, and for some of the same reasons

Among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language

O'Hara practices the classic form of the modern short story developed by Joyce and perfected by Hemingway... His coverage is worthy of a Balzac

O'Hara occupies a unique position in our contemporary literature.... He 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

Superb... The 32 stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons... O'Hara was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of midcentury society

His short stories are gorgeous broken scenes of American life...and his style and themes - a bridge, if you will, between F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Updike -remain painfully and beautifully relevant today

O Hara [was] a master of the short story... The stories have the tang of genuine observation and reporting... You're aware of how brilliantly O Hara uses dialogue to convey exposition, and of how often his people, like Hemingway s, leave unsaid what is really on their minds... Don Draper is an O Hara character if ever there was one

‘Superb... These thirty-two stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons... O'Hara was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of mid-century society’ Wall Street Journal 
 
John O'Hara remains the great chronicler of American society, and nowhere are his powers more evident than in his portraits of New York's so-called Golden Age. Unsparingly observed, brilliantly cutting and always on the tragic edge of epiphany, the stories collected here are among O’Hara’s finest work, and show why he still stands as the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker.

John O'Hara

Mr O'Hara's eyes and ears have been spared nothing, but he has kept in his heart a curious and bitter mercy

O'Hara writes with swift realism, wisely avoids sentimentality

Dramatic...exciting...vivid and written at high speed...accurate and often penetrating

John O’Hara on John O’Hara. He had this inscribed on his gravestone.

'For all its excellence as a social panorama and a sketch of a marriage, it is as a picture of a man destroyed by drink and pride that Appointment in Samarra lives frighteningly in the mind' John Updike 
 
Julian English prides himself a member of his hometown’s social elite, but from the moment he throws a cocktail in the face of a powerful business associate his life spirals out of control, taking his loving but troubled marriage with it. 
 
Following English’s rapid decline and fall, Appointment in Samarra is a fast-paced and blackly comic portrait of 1930s America. O’Hara’s debut novel introduced a prolific new voice to a generation and still stands as one of the great works of American fiction.

John O'Hara

Praise for Appointment in Samarra

Mr O'Hara's eyes and ears have been spared nothing, but he has kept in his heart a curious and bitter mercy

O'Hara writes with swift realism, wisely avoids sentimentality

Dramatic...exciting...vivid and written at high speed...accurate and often penetrating

Mr O'Hara's eyes and ears have been spared nothing, but he has kept in his heart a curious and bitter mercy

O'Hara writes with swift realism, wisely avoids sentimentality

Dramatic...exciting...vivid and written at high speed...accurate and often penetrating

Mr O'Hara's eyes and ears have been spared nothing, but he has kept in his heart a curious and bitter mercy

O'Hara writes with swift realism, wisely avoids sentimentality

Dramatic...exciting...vivid and written at high speed...accurate and often penetrating

Books by John O'Hara

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter