John O'Hara's Pennsylvania Historical Marker in Pottsville
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
John O'Hara, Pottsville, Schuylkill County
By Unidentified Author
Before I get started with the latest post, I wanted to offer a small shout-out
to the women of the Herstory Club! This internet collective is made up entirely
of women of all ages who focus on the study of history, and I was recently
welcomed into the ranks. I'm very excited to be in the club
and appreciate the kind greetings I've received, so thank you!
November is here and I hope you are all well! At this time last year
I was battling what turned out to be pneumonia, but so far
I've been much luckier this autumn. The weather hasn't
been the most conducive to going out to collect markers, but
I've still got some stockpiled from before the lockdown, so we're
going to take a trip back to Schuylkill County today to look
at one of Pennsylvania's native authors.
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| The marker is located in front of O'Hara's childhood home at 606 Mahantongo Street |
John O'Hara was born in Pottsville on January 31, 1905,
the eldest of eight children born to Patrick and Katharine (Delaney)
O'Hara. Where the family lived initially I don't know, but when
John was eleven years old, the family moved into a
three-story house on Pottsville's Mahantongo Street, not
far from the Burd Patterson mansion. The house, known
today as the John O'Hara House, was originally built by
the Yuengling family, and the O'Haras lived there until 1928.
His Irish Catholic family was relatively affluent, his
father being a doctor. This enabled him to attend the
prestigious Niagara Prep school in Lewiston, New York,
as a young man. He had dreams of attending Yale,
but his father's death in 1925 put an end to that dream,
as the family was left struggling financially after
the loss. Instead of heading for Yale as he wanted,
O'Hara had to look for work to support his
mother and younger siblings Mary, Martin, James,
Eugene, Kathleen, Joseph, and Thomas. Having
grown up with the best of what life could
offer - membership in country clubs, domestic
servants, things like that - and then having it
taken away almost overnight left a permanent
mark on John, and would impact much of his life's work.
O'Hara could write well; his class at Niagara Prep
had elected him Class Poet in 1924. So to help his
family, he did what made the most sense - he got a
job with the local newspaper, the Pottsville News.
Later in life he also wrote for New
York papers Mirror, Telegraph, and Herald Tribune,
as well as Time magazine. The New Yorker
published many if not most of his short stories.
During World War II he served as a war
correspondent in the Pacific theater.
What he is best remembered for producing,
however, are his books. His first novel was
published in 1934; Appointment in Samarra
was well received and even garnered a
ringing endorsement from Ernest Hemingway,
who called the author "a man who knows exactly
what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well".
His second novel, Butterfield 8, soon followed and was later
turned into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, who won an Oscar for her performance. Another novel, Pal Joey, was originally published serially in the New Yorker;
this became a musical on Broadway starring Gene
Kelly in 1940, and later became a film starring Frank
Sinatra. Paul Newman starred in another film based
on one of his novels, From the Terrace, which in
O'Hara's own opinion was "the best thing I've ever
done." By the time of his death, he had written several
novels and over 400 short stories.
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| Pottsville's John O'Hara House |
marker, I had never heard of John O'Hara.
I had to wonder why, if he was a native
Pennsylvanian and such a prolific writer,
I wouldn't know who he was.
Apparently, the best answer comes
from the words of fellow author
Fran Lebowitz, who once said
that it was because "every single
person who knew him hated him."
I imagine that's an exaggeration,
of course, but various sources
indicate that O'Hara did have
a reputation for being
sometimes unpleasant.
When he drank, he was known
for picking fights, and though
he stopped drinking during the last twenty years of his life,
he still had a temper. He was offered (and, for some reason,
declined) three honorary degrees from other schools, but
he was never able to successfully petition his dream
school of Yale to give him one, which rankled him
sorely. According to Lorin Stein, who wrote about him
several years after his death, he would swipe matchbooks
from social clubs which didn't accept him as a member, and
"he demanded from his publishers not just high advances but
also gifts and lunches at the Ritz. He was addicted to the
tokens of success." He was a nominee for the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1962 (and he wrote to his daughter
that he wanted it "so bad I can taste it"), but it
went to John Steinbeck instead. To his credit,
however, O'Hara had a sense of humor about the
loss - he sent Steinbeck a telegram stating, "Congratulations,
I can think of only one other author I'd rather see get it."
In fact, his only major literary award was the
National Book Award, which was given to his novel
Ten North Frederick in 1956.
John O'Hara's works frequently include a location
called Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a small anthracite
mining community which is of course a barely-concealed
representation of Pottsville. (He named it for Wolcott Gibbs,
who was a friend and frequently his editor at The New Yorker.)
Like I said earlier, growing up wealthy and then having the wealth
stripped from his family so suddenly left its mark on his personality;
another thing which affected him his whole life was growing up
Catholic in a largely Protestant society. He always felt like an
outsider, and his class insecurity was a recurring theme in
his writing. Yale also appears often, as many of his characters
attended Yale since he could not.
In his personal life, O'Hara was married three times. His first
marriage, to Helen Ritchie, ended in divorce after just two years;
a few years later, in 1937, he married Belle Wylie. Their daughter,
Wylie Delaney O'Hara, is the author's only child. He remained
married to Belle until her death in 1954, and a year later remarried
Katherine Barnes Bryan, to whom he was married until his own
death. He had a fatal heart attack in his sleep and passed
away on April 11, 1970; at that time he was living in Princeton,
New Jersey, and is buried there in Princeton Cemetery. He had
recently completed one last novel, The Ewing, which was
published posthumously in 1971, and was working on a sequel
that would never be finished.
John O'Hara was a complex individual, from everything I've read,
and I get the distinct impression that you either loved this guy or
you hated him. But in his own words, in response to some callous
reviews, "It is traditional that if you are a great artist, no one
gives a damn about you while you're still alive." So I leave it
to his readers to decide how they feel about him now, fifty
years after he's gone.
Sources and Further Reading:
Stein, Lorin. "He Told the Truth About His Time." The New Yorker, August 19, 2013.
John O'Hara at the Library of America
John O'Hara's obituary in the Camden, New Jersey Courier Post, April 13, 1970. Courtesy of Newspapers.com.
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