BUtterfield 8

THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

In August Penguin Classics re-published BUtterfield 8.

Here are some excerpts from the Introduction by Lorin Stein, Editor of The Paris Review:

Many of his short stories have stood the test of time, but as a novelist, he never surpassed his first efforts. His novels of the mid-thirties are his classics, and they to be much more famous than they are. ....On the topics of class, sex, and alcohol - that is, the topics that mattered to him - his novels amount to a secret history of American life....
This heroine, Gloria Wandrous, is one of O'Hara's true originals: a young woman endowed with beauty, a strong libido, and large sexual experience, who is neither a pornographic fantasy nor a femme fatale....
Gloria is a creature of the great sexual revolution of the twentieth century - the one that occurred in the twenties, thanks to cars and speakeasies....this is a New York novel set in the immediate aftermath of the crash. In the story of this party girl and her circle, O'Hara means to capture the zeitgeist.
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