THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

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Saturday, January 26, 2013, Jenny Saliba, Robert Knott and Steven Goldleaf attended the Annual General Meeting in NYC. More details to follow.

In October 2013 Penguin will publish John O'Hara's New York Stories, edited and with an introduction by Steven Goldleaf, who read us his introduction, which is straightforward and brilliant. I told him he is one of the very, very few out there who "gets it" about John O'Hara.
(I hope this will lead to republication of his 1999 book, John O'Hara, a Study of the Short Fiction, which to me has been an invaluable resource.)

New York Stories, which has about 32 of them, will join the other books of short stories - Matthew Bruccoli's Gibbsville, Pa. and John O'Hara's Hollywood.

After the great 3 1/2 hour lunch Robert Knott and Jenny and I took a cab to the Armory at Park Avenue and 67th for the annual Winter Antiques Show. I stopped at the Bauman Rare Books exhibit and asked about John O'Hara and was told the Madison Avenue store is offering an original edition of Appointment in Samarra for about $6,000 (up from $3,500 a few years ago), as well as an original signed edition of BUtterfield 8 for $20,000.

On this day, January 27, 1945, the short story Mrs. Whitman, was published in The New Yorker. It later appears in Pipe Night and Gibbsville, Pa.

As the result of a dispute, John O'Hara stopped writing for The New Yorker for about 10 years. On September 16, 1960 he returned to the magazine with the publication of Imagine Kissing Pete. A few months afterward, on this day, January 27, 1961, he wrote William Shawn, who had succeeded Harold Ross as Editor of The New Yorker: "Thank you for the cheques...More satisfactory is the pleasure of writing short stories once again and the comfort of seeing them in the magazine." From Bruccoli, Matthew J., Selected Letters of John O'Hara.

Here's an excerpt from a January 27, 1967 letter to Graham Watson, his English agent: "Cocktail parties are the same world over. A woman with bad breath grabs hold of your lapel and clings. But if you're strong enough and rude enough, you can knock her down and back away."