Writing with equal insight about New York City, Hollywood, and the
small-town Pennsylvania world where he grew up, John O'Hara cultivated
an unsentimental and often unsparing realism, aiming, he said, "to
record the way people talked and thought and felt . . . with complete
honesty." Praised by contemporaries including Ernest Hemingway and
Dorothy Parker, he wrote about sex, drinking, and social class with a
frankness ahead of its time. The fiction he published in The New
Yorker (more than any other writer to this day) came to epitomize the
kind of short story featured in that magazine, and his impeccable ear
and skillful dialogue have influenced later writers such as Raymond
Carver. Bringing together sixty stories written over four decades--the
largest, most comprehensive collection of O'Hara's stories ever
published--former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath
presents a fresh and arresting new perspective on one of American
literature's master storytellers.
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