Career and reputation
Initially, O'Hara worked as a reporter for various newspapers. Moving to New York City, he began to write short stories for magazines. During the early part of his career, he was also a film critic, a radio commentator and a press agent. In 1934, O'Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra. Endorsing the novel, Ernest Hemingway wrote: "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 Samarra with BUtterfield 8, his roman à clef based upon the tragic, short life of flapper Starr Faithfull, whose mysterious death in 1931 became a tabloid sensation. Over four decades, O'Hara published novels, novellas, plays, screenplays and more than 400 short stories, the majority of them in the New Yorker.
During World War II, he was a correspondent in the Pacific theater. After the war, he wrote screenplays and more novels, including Ten North Frederick, for which he won the 1956 National Book Award and From the Terrace (1958), which he considered his "greatest achievement as a novelist." Late in life, with his reputation established, he became a newspaper columnist. In his last decade, O'Hara created "a body of work of magnificent dimensions," wrote the novelist George V. Higgins, whose own trademark dialogue was influenced heavily by O'Hara's style. "Between 1960 and 1968," Higgins noted, O'Hara "published six novels, seven collections of short fiction, and some 137 terse and extended stories that all by themselves would supply credentials for a towering reputation in the world of perfect justice that he never did quite find."
Many of O'Hara's stories (and his later novels written in the 1950s) are set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a barely fictionalized version of his home town of Pottsville, a small city in the anthracite region of the northeastern United States. He named Gibbsville for his friend and frequent editor at the New Yorker Wolcott Gibbs. Most of his other stories were set in New York or Hollywood.
O'Hara's short stories earned him his highest critical acclaim. He contributed more of them to the New Yorker than any other writer. He complained that his numerous short stories took his time away from writing novels. "I had an apparently inexhaustible urge to express an unlimited supply of short story ideas. No writing has ever come more easily to me," he claimed. In the Library of America's collection of 60 of O'Hara's best stories, editor Charles McGrath praises them for their "sketchlike lightness and brevity... in which nothing necessarily 'happens' in the old-fashioned sense, but in which some crucial loss or discovery is revealed just by implication ... a sense of speed and economy is just what makes the best of these stories so thrilling." Gill, who worked with O'Hara at the New Yorker, ranks him "among the greatest short-story writers in English, or in any other language" and credits him with helping "to invent what the world came to call the New Yorker short story." In the foreword to a collection published four years before his death, O'Hara declared, "No one writes them any better than I do." Two more volumes of his stories were published soon after his death.
Despite his success as a best-selling author, most of O'Hara's longer work is not held in as high regard by the literary establishment. Critic Benjamin Schwarz and writer Christina Schwarz claimed: "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 O'Hara's novels and stories are tied off with clumsy, abrupt endings. Some of the harsh literary criticism is attributed to personal dislike of O'Hara's abrasive ego and arrogant manner, his vigorous self-promotion, his obsession with his social status, and the politically conservative columns he wrote late in his career. Early and mid-20th century critics also disparaged his novels for their blunt and non-judgmental depictions of loose women and homosexuals, but critics writing after the sexual revolution saw in O'Hara a pioneer in showing sexuality in frank, realistic ways. John Kenneth Galbraith, writing about the strict Calvinist culture of his early 20th century childhood in remote, rural Ontario, remembered, "We were taught that sexual intercourse was, under all circumstances, a sin, and we were free from the countervailing influence of movies, television and John O'Hara." O'Hara's most biting critics regard his novels as shallow and overly concerned with sexual desire, drinking and surface details at the expense of deeper meaning. Many of his leading characters are alcoholics who live as emotional zombies, anesthetized by drinking to the agony of the human heart in conflict with itself. As his contemporary William Faulkner said of such writers in his Nobel Prize address of 1949, "He writes not of the heart but of the glands."
In 1949, O'Hara left the New Yorker bitterly, after it published a withering review of O'Hara's long novel A Rage to Live by his colleague Brendan Gill. Gill disparaged O'Hara's book as "a formula family novel," one of those turned out by "writers of the third and fourth magnitude in such disheartening abundance," and declared it "a catastrophe" by an author who "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" on one of the New Yorker's most popular writers. "During the preceding two decades O'Hara had been the New Yorker's most prolific contributor of stories" (no fewer than 197 by one count). After the magazine published Gill's review, O'Hara quit writing for the New Yorker for more than a decade, and when readers complained to Gill for driving O'Hara away, Gill deflected blame onto another New Yorker contributor, James Thurber, for stirring up animosity. O'Hara would not resume writing for the New Yorker until the 1960s, upon the arrival of a new editor who sought out O'Hara with an olive branch. Nearly 50 years after the scandalous review, at a forum on O'Hara's legacy held in 1996, Gill stood up in the audience to explain his attack on O'Hara, pleading that "I had to tell the truth about the novel."
According to biographer Frank MacShane, O'Hara thought that Hemingway's death made O'Hara the leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. O'Hara wrote to his daughter, "I really think I will get it," and "I want the Nobel prize ... so bad I can taste it." MacShane says that T.S. Eliot told O'Hara that he had, in fact, been nominated twice. When John Steinbeck won the prize in 1962, O'Hara wired, "Congratulations, I can think of only one other author I'd rather see get it." In a letter to Steinbeck two years before that, O'Hara placed himself with Steinbeck in the pantheon of great 20th century American writers, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, singling out Faulkner among them as "the one, the genius."
O'Hara's work has many literary admirers, including authors such as Joan Didion, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Fran Lebowitz and Shelby Foote. Charles McGrath, a former fiction editor of the New Yorker and former editor of the New York Times Book Review, has called O'Hara "one of the great listeners of American fiction, able to write dialogue that sounded the way people really talk, and he also learned the eavesdropper's secret—how often people leave unsaid what is really on their minds." O'Hara said he learned from reading Ring Lardner "that if you wrote down speech as it is spoken truly, you produce true characters," and added, "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."
