THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

I forgot to mention yesterday that Elizabeth Appleton was published fifty years ago on June 4, 1963. In the author's words, "It is a novel about a marriage in a small Pennsylvania college town." I read it several years ago and enjoyed it, but I think it's one of the minor ones.
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On June 5, 1943, publication of "Now You Know." The New Yorker. Pipe Night. Mary lives with her mother and sisters in Queens and takes the bus into New York every morning. Herbert, unhappily married and the father of three, is the driver. The two develop a strong attraction to each other, an attraction so strong for Herbert that he asks his company to transfer him to another route. Herbert's the first to blurt out his love for Mary, and Mary tells him if he hadn't she would have. Unlike O'Hara, it's all pure innocence.

From a June 5, 1962 letter to The New York Herald Tribune:

   If the President is not going to read anything I say in the Herald Tribune...I don't know how I am going to get across to him. Possibly through a series of oversights, I have not been invited to any of the cultural evenings at the White House, so I have missed out on that opportunity to give him the benefit of my experience in international and domestic affairs....
   It was Woodrow Wilson, I believe, who first respectabilized the mystery story, but it remained for Mr. Kennedy to be the first President to single out a whodunit author. I am a little sorry that the author had to be an Englishman....
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The Englishman is Ian Fleming. James Bond would never have made it into the big time had President Kennedy not mentioned that he enjoyed reading Ian Fleming novels.