Wikipedia Deep Dive

John O'Hara

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The Writer Who Wanted Yale More Than Fame

John O'Hara might be the most addictive American writer you've never heard of. That's not hyperbole—it's the assessment of Lorin Stein, who as editor-in-chief of The Paris Review wrote in 2013 that you can binge on O'Hara's collections "the way some people binge on Mad Men, and for some of the same reasons."

The comparison is apt. Both O'Hara and that television drama dissect the same territory: mid-twentieth-century America, with all its class anxieties, sexual secrets, and rivers of alcohol. On these subjects—class, sex, and drinking—O'Hara produced what Stein called "a secret history of American life."

Yet few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have encountered his work. The reason is almost comically self-defeating: O'Hara refused to allow his writing to appear in the anthologies that professors use to teach American literature. He strangled his own legacy out of pride.

The Fall That Shaped Everything

To understand O'Hara, you have to understand what happened to him at nineteen years old.

He was born in 1905 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, to an affluent Irish American family. His father was a successful doctor. The O'Haras lived among the gentry of eastern Pennsylvania—they had club memberships, riding lessons, dance lessons, fancy cars in the barn, domestic servants in the house. Young John attended Niagara Prep, where he was named Class Poet for the graduating class of 1924.

Then his father died.

Overnight, everything vanished. The money. The status. His dream of attending Yale. The privileged life he had known simply evaporated.

This fall afflicted O'Hara with what we might now call status anxiety, and it never left him. It sharpened his eye for the invisible hierarchies of American society into something almost surgical. But it also left him wounded in ways that would sabotage his relationships and his reputation for the rest of his life.

There was another complication. Though the O'Haras lived among the elite, they were Irish Catholic in a world dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—the so-called WASPs who controlled America's old money and old institutions. O'Hara grew up as a permanent outsider looking in, wealthy enough to see how the truly powerful lived but marked by his religion as not quite one of them. He wrote about this insider-outsider perspective again and again.

The Yale Obsession

O'Hara's longing for Yale became legendary—and not in a flattering way.

Brendan Gill, who worked with O'Hara at The New Yorker magazine, claimed that O'Hara was nearly obsessed with his failure to attend the university. "People used to make fun of the fact that O'Hara wanted so desperately to have gone to Yale," Gill recalled, "but it was never a joke to O'Hara."

Ernest Hemingway, with characteristic cruelty dressed as humor, once suggested that someone should "start a bloody fund to send John O'Hara to Yale."

As O'Hara's literary fame grew, he yearned for an honorary degree from Yale—the kind of recognition that would retroactively admit him to the club he'd been denied. But Yale never offered one. According to Gill, the university refused precisely because O'Hara had made it so obvious that he wanted it. He had "obstreperously asked for it," and institutions like Yale don't reward that kind of naked need.

Inventing The New Yorker Short Story

O'Hara began his career as a newspaper reporter, bouncing between various papers before moving to New York City to write short fiction for magazines. He also worked as a film critic, a radio commentator, and a press agent—the kind of scattered early career common to writers who haven't yet found their audience.

He found it at The New Yorker.

O'Hara contributed more short stories to that magazine than any other writer in its history. Gill credited him with helping "to invent what the world came to call the New Yorker short story"—that particular style where nothing necessarily happens in the traditional sense, but some crucial loss or discovery is revealed through implication and restraint.

Charles McGrath, who edited a collection of sixty of O'Hara's best stories for the Library of America, praised their "sketchlike lightness and brevity," their "sense of speed and economy." This minimalist approach—showing rather than telling, leaving the emotional punch unstated—became the dominant mode of literary short fiction for decades.

O'Hara himself had no false modesty about his gifts. In the foreword to a collection published four years before his death, he declared: "No one writes them any better than I do."

The Novelist as Best-Seller

In 1934, at age twenty-nine, O'Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra. Hemingway endorsed it with characteristic directness: "If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra."

O'Hara followed this success with BUtterfield 8—note the unusual capitalization, meant to evoke a telephone exchange from that era. The novel was a roman à clef, a thinly disguised retelling of real events, based on the tragic life of a young woman named Starr Faithfull, whose mysterious death in 1931 had become a tabloid sensation.

Both novels made O'Hara famous before he turned thirty.

After World War II, during which O'Hara served as a correspondent in the Pacific theater, he achieved extraordinary commercial success. His novels repeatedly appeared on Publishers Weekly's annual list of the top ten best-selling fiction works in America. These included A Rage to Live in 1949, Ten North Frederick in 1955 (which won the National Book Award the following year), and From the Terrace in 1958, which O'Hara considered his "greatest achievement as a novelist."

Five of his works were adapted into films in the 1950s and 1960s. Elizabeth Taylor won the Academy Award for Best Actress playing the lead in BUtterfield 8, though she famously said of the finished film: "I think it stinks."

Gibbsville: A Town of the Mind

Many of O'Hara's stories and later novels are set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania—a fictional town that was really just Pottsville with a different name.

He named it for Wolcott Gibbs, his friend and frequent editor at The New Yorker. This was typical of O'Hara: a gesture that combined affection for a colleague with the writer's instinct to transform real life into fiction.

Gibbsville became O'Hara's Yoknapatawpha County—William Faulkner's famous fictional Mississippi setting—a place he could return to again and again, building a complete social world across decades of writing. The anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania, with its rigid class distinctions and ethnic hierarchies, provided endless material for his examinations of American status anxiety.

The Ear for Dialogue

O'Hara had what McGrath called the gift of "one of the great listeners of American fiction." He could write dialogue that sounded the way people really talk—and more importantly, he understood what people leave unsaid.

O'Hara credited the writer Ring Lardner with teaching him this skill. "If you wrote down speech as it is spoken truly," O'Hara learned, "you produce true characters."

He was characteristically immodest about this ability: "Sometimes I almost feel that I ought to apologize for having the ability to write good dialogue, and yet it's the attribute most lacking in American writers and almost totally lacking in the British."

This gift influenced other writers. The novelist George V. Higgins, known for his own distinctive dialogue, acknowledged O'Hara's heavy influence on his trademark style.

The Enemies He Made

Despite his success—or perhaps because of it—O'Hara accumulated enemies.

He had an outsized and easily bruised ego. He was an alcoholic prone to irascibility. He held grudges for years. And by the 1960s, his politically conservative views had become deeply unfashionable in literary circles.

The literary establishment, despite his sales figures, never fully embraced his novels. Critics Benjamin Schwarz and Christina Schwarz noted that "so widespread is the literary world's scorn for John O'Hara that the inclusion of Appointment in Samarra on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century was used to ridicule the entire project."

Some of this criticism was legitimate. O'Hara's novels sometimes ended clumsily and abruptly. His harshest critics found them shallow, overly concerned with sexual desire, drinking, and surface details at the expense of deeper meaning.

William Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1949, seemed to be thinking of writers like O'Hara when he said: "He writes not of the heart but of the glands."

But some of the criticism was clearly personal—payback for O'Hara's abrasive manner, his vigorous self-promotion, and his tiresome obsession with his own social status.

The New Yorker Divorce

In 1949, The New Yorker published a review of O'Hara's novel A Rage to Live that nearly destroyed his relationship with the magazine.

The reviewer was Brendan Gill—his own colleague. Gill called O'Hara's book "a formula family novel," the kind turned out by "writers of the third and fourth magnitude in such disheartening abundance." He declared it "a catastrophe" by an author who had "plainly intended to write nothing less than a great American novel."

Literary critics called Gill's review a "savage attack" and a "cruel hatchet job." O'Hara had been the magazine's most prolific contributor of stories for two decades—197 of them by one count. After Gill's review appeared, O'Hara quit writing for The New Yorker for more than ten years.

When readers complained to Gill for driving O'Hara away, Gill deflected blame onto another New Yorker writer, James Thurber, claiming Thurber had stirred up the animosity.

O'Hara didn't return until the 1960s, when a new editor sought him out with an olive branch.

Nearly fifty years after the review, at a 1996 forum on O'Hara's legacy, the elderly Gill stood up in the audience to explain his attack. His defense was simple: "I had to tell the truth about the novel."

The Nobel He Never Won

After Ernest Hemingway died in 1961, O'Hara believed he had become the leading American candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"I really think I will get it," he wrote to his daughter. "I want the Nobel prize so bad I can taste it."

His biographer Frank MacShane reports that the poet T.S. Eliot told O'Hara he had been nominated twice. When John Steinbeck won the prize in 1962, O'Hara sent a telegram: "Congratulations, I can think of only one other author I'd rather see get it."

The one other author, of course, was himself.

The Final Decade

In his last ten years, O'Hara produced what Higgins called "a body of work of magnificent dimensions." Between 1960 and 1968 alone, he published six novels, seven collections of short fiction, and some 137 stories.

John Updike, an admirer of O'Hara's writing, observed after his death: "He out-produced our capacity for appreciation; maybe now we can settle down and marvel at him all over again."

O'Hara died of cardiovascular disease in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1970. He is buried in Princeton Cemetery.

The Epitaph

O'Hara chose his own epitaph, and his wife had it inscribed on his grave:

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

Brendan Gill, his old colleague and nemesis, couldn't resist one final jab. "From the far side of the grave," Gill commented, "he remains self-defensive and overbearing. Better than anyone else? Not merely better than any other writer of fiction but better than any dramatist, any poet, any biographer, any historian? It is an astonishing claim."

It was an astonishing claim. But that was O'Hara: talented, prolific, insecure, arrogant, and unable to stop asking for the recognition he so desperately craved. He invented a new kind of American short story, wrote best-sellers for three decades, and influenced writers who are still read today.

And he never got over not going to Yale.

The Afterlife

O'Hara's study was reconstructed for display at Pennsylvania State University in 1974, where his papers are held. His childhood home in Pottsville was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

His epistolary novel Pal Joey became a successful Broadway musical with songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was later made into a film starring Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the television drama Mad Men, which aired from 2007 to 2015, generated renewed interest in O'Hara's work. The show's creator, Matthew Weiner, was exploring the same territory O'Hara had mapped decades earlier: the drinking, the class anxiety, the sexual secrets of mid-century American life.

O'Hara might have appreciated the irony. He spent his career writing about people who drank too much and worried too much about what others thought of them. Decades after his death, a cable television show about exactly those themes brought readers back to his books.

He told the truth about his time. Whether he told it better than anyone else is still being debated.