The Novellas of John O’Hara

John O’Hara’s novellas and his long short stories represent much of his best work. They are marked by the meticulous attention to detail and veracious dialogue that are habitual to O’Hara. His style of fiction, which often follows one individual or relationship through an unpredictable and unstable course, is frequently better served by the shorter form.

The ten stories presented here were written in the sixties, the last decade of O’Hara’s life, when he was as prolific as ever and concerned to record as much of what he had seen in his lifetime as possible. They are set during his adulthood and in the places that he knew, lived in, and always wrote about: Gibbsville (the fictionalized Pottsville, where he had grown up), Philadelphia, New York, and Hollywood. The characters are also familiar: O’Hara’s alter ego, the writer Jim Malloy, the mismatched couples and disappointed lovers, the rising and fading stars of Hollywood, the socially aspiring, and the criminal fringe of the Prohibition era.

As O’Hara’s biographer Frank MacShane notes, the stories are “still extraordinarily alive.” O’Hara effortlessly crafts stories that are propelled by his beautifully observed dialogue and studded with his placement of people by what they drink and the way they drink it, their cars, and their clothes. The life in the stories is in this detail, and in the universal applicability that his themes have for the late
twentieth century.