@philabooks Web Catalog 5 (MMVI)

Catalog No. 5
January 2006

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At Penn State

O'Hara Study

Novelist, playwright, and columnist John O'Hara (1905-1970) was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in the state's northeastern anthracite coal region. Although O'Hara left Pennsylvania as a young man, he never lost track of it; beginning with his first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), he set five novels and more than fifty short stories in what he called "my Pennsylvania Protectorate." The characters of O'Hara's fictional town of Gibbsville were the miners and poor immigrants, the bartenders, the country-club set, and the college-bred middle class of his hometown.

Some ten years before his death in 1970, O'Hara had begun to distribute his manuscripts to various university libraries. One of these manuscripts, the typescript of Sermons and Soda Water, was sent to Penn State in honor of Richardson Dilworth, a former mayor of Philadelphia and at the time a Trustee of Penn State. This gift prompted William L. Werner, an old friend of O'Hara's and a professor of American literature at Penn State, to suggest that in the interests of scholarship it would be far more useful to have all of O'Hara's manuscripts at one location. O'Hara from then on not only gave the University Libraries the typescripts of his published works but also provided in his Will that all of his manuscripts eventually be deposited at Penn State.
It was the idea of O'Hara's widow, the late Katharine B. O'Hara, that the author's original study at Linebrook in Princeton, New Jersey, be re-created at Penn State. The suggestion gave everyone with curatorial experience some pause, but it was an irresistible notion. John O'Hara was, after all, the Pennsylvania novelist, his only competition being Conrad Richter and John Updike. (Updike himself once pointed out that he and O'Hara could have been nurtured only in Pennsylvania, not in Boston or Brooklyn.) O'Hara's Gibbsville is as well-known and enduring as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.
But O'Hara was more than just a Pennsylvania writer; he was a writer of national stature. Appointment in Samarra, written before he was thirty, is still considered one of the best American novels of the first half of this century. Ten North Frederick won a National Book Award in 1956. In 1964 O'Hara received a Gold Medal of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. By the time of his death in 1970, his bestsellers had sold some forty million copies, and five of his works had been made into big-budget motion pictures, including Butterfield 8, Pal Joey (which won him a Screen Writers' Award), A Rage to Live,From the Terrace. He was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and wrote some four hundred short stories in addition to nineteen novels.
It seemed altogether fitting that Penn State recognize John O'Hara's achievements by accepting the study and its contents as a memorial to the man and as a repository for a considerable legacy of books, manuscripts, letters, and memorabilia. The O'Hara Study was dedicated in 1974, with Mrs. O'Hara and O'Hara's daughter, Wylie, in attendance.
The study is virtually an O'Hara museum, with memorabilia from every stage of his life. It contains O'Hara's National Book Award, His Gold Medal for the Novel, and a whole series of certificates recognizing his achievements in theater and film. His collections of antique horns and various Pennsylvania antiques enliven a space that is filled to overflowing with objects illustrating his career and interests. There are photos of daughter Wylie and Charles Addams in a Bugatti; of a coonskin-clad O'Hara in a Stutz Bearcat; of a racehorse named O'Hara; of the O'Hara Rolls Royce; of Robert Benchley in an admiral's jacket but without trousers; of O'Hara with Bennett Cerf and Cardinal Spellman. There are decoy ducks, cuspidors, model cars, sabers, fire extinguishers, ashtrays, and engraved silver cigarette boxes from his publishers. The desk is covered with the tools of his trade, and the drawers hold his calendars and appointment books.
O'Hara's study was the working room of a writer who was dedicated to getting things right, so the shelves are stocked with reference books: technical dictionaries, Who's Who in America, Burke's Peerage, The Dictionary of American Biography, two editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, medical books, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women, histories of the automobile, military reference books, works on Pennsylvania, club yearbooks, atlases, horse books, book on music, books on sports. O'Hara referred to his study as his laboratory, and the memorabilia made him feel comfortable and helped to release the flow of memory. When he went into this room every night to write, the familiar items became part of the process of literary creation.
For information about visiting the O'Hara Study or consulting the John O'Hara Papers, 1923-1991, write or call Rare Books and Manuscripts (814/865-1793).
Photo: John O'Hara in his original study

John O'Hara in his original study [photo by Martin d'Arcy]
Page last updated 30 May 2002.



O'Hara Biography

John O'Hara - (1905-1970)

By
John Paul Smith
John O'Hara, considered in his day a gifted yet controversial writer of both novels and short stories, was born on January 31, 1905 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He spent time in Pennsylvania for the early part of his childhood until his parents decided to send him off to Niagara Preparatory School in Niagara, New York. He graduated in 1924. When O'Hara's father died, his family went into poverty. For that reason, O'Hara couldn't go to college. He went to work as a reporter for various newspapers in Pennsylvania until 1926. For the rest of the twenties he traveled around the country until he settled in New York and got a job with the Hollywood columnist Heywood Broun. In 1928, O'Hara's published his first short story in The New Yorker Magazine. He would eventually become a regular contributor to the magazine.
In 1934, O'Hara published his first novel Appointment in Samarra. This novel was a major success along with his second novel Butterfield 8. These novels established O'Hara as a big time novelist. In 1940, one of O'Hara's novel Pal Joey was turned into a musical with the help of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The original run wasn't successful, but another run in 1952 was a huge success.
During World War II, O'Hara became a correspondent in the Pacific. After the war, O'Hara concentrated on becoming a screenwriter. He was involved in the writing of On Our Merry Way , and even novels that brought him success in the past.
The 1950's and 1960's brought more success to the novelist. He wrote the novels A Rage To Live, From a Terrace, and Ten North Fredrick , (which won O'Hara the National Book Award in 1955). O'Hara settled in Princeton, New Jersey where he died on April 11, 1970.
Appointment in Samarra when released in 1934 was widely received by the public, but was criticized for its frank discussion of sex. The book delves into the social lives of the upper middle class of the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. The novel's main character, Jullian English, is a man who is well employed. He gets in trouble at a Christmas party when he gets plastered and throws a drink in his boss' face. O'Hara's development of the characters in this book through their dialogue shows why John O'Hara is considered one of the greatest storytellers of this century.
Butterfield 8 (1935) is another novel where John O'Hara shows the flaws ofa society in the New York Speakeasy Society. The story centers on the death of Starr Faithful and the insuing investigation surrounding her death. O'Hara has won acclaim for his satire of upper middle class. This book was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor.
Literary Works
Appointment in Samarra (1934)
The Doctor's Son and Other Stories (1935)
Butterfield 8 (1935)
Hope of Heaven (1938)
Files on Parade (1939)
Pal Joey (1940)
A Rage To Live (1949)
Ten North Fredrick (1955)
From The Terrace (1958)
IV. Sources O'Hara, John. Biography. 9 Apr 2000


O'Hara, John. Encarta. 9 Apr 2000
http://encarta.msn.com O'Hara, John. Amazon. 12 Apr 2000
http://www.amazon.com
This essay was submitted by a student of Cheryl Petersohn, a teacher at Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.



Burning Bridges

'The Art of Burning Bridges':

Redeeming John O'Hara

At The New Yorker in the mid-1970's, it was still possible to hear editors debating which of the magazine's illustrious contributors had been the bigger jerk and the more impossible to deal with -- James Thurber or John O'Hara. Thurber usually won -- no small feat considering that O'Hara (when he was sober) was famously boorish, vain, petty, snobbish, quarrelsome and just plain hard to take.
When he was drunk (which was often), he was apt to punch you out just for looking at him the wrong way -- even if you were a woman or, as on one memorable occasion at ''21,'' a midget. Yet history has chosen to forgive Thurber, an even nastier drunk, and he is now permanently enshrined as a lovable American original. In O'Hara's case, the taint of his personality somehow seeped into the way his books were received (the process of conflating the two was begun by the moralizing Orville Prescott, writing in this newspaper in the 1940's), and his literary reputation has suffered as a result. Fran Lebowitz once remarked that O'Hara was ''an underrated writer because every single person who knew him hated him.'' That's a stretch, obviously, but O'Hara was without a doubt his own worst enemy, with a genius, as the title of Geoffrey Wolff's fine new biography suggests, for burning his bridges behind him.
In a preface, Wolff writes that he began the book because he believed that O'Hara resembled his own father, the con man about whom he wrote so memorably in ''The Duke of Deception.'' (Wolff is also the author of several novels and of a biography of Harry and Caresse Crosby.) In fact, as he quickly discovered, Duke Wolff and John O'Hara couldn't have been more different; about all they had in common was the habit of cadging matchbooks or stationery from the Racquet Club, so that they could pretend to membership. Even so, Wolff persisted with the book, out of an impulse, he suggests, to redeem O'Hara both as a writer and as a human being.
The result is a biography that is both satisfying and pleasingly unconventional, and one that O'Hara would probably have hated. He would have wanted the full scholarly treatment, like Matthew J. Bruccoli's 1975 data dump, ''The O'Hara Concern.'' But ''The Art of Burning Bridges'' is from beginning to end not a scholar's book but one by a fellow writer: it's conversational and opinionated -- even autobiographical at times, with Wolff recounting his own experiences with rejection (''that particular pain, a stab of shame that something tended and tendered has been repulsed''), with editors and editing, with the indignities of writing for Hollywood. Sometimes Wolff relies on hunches instead of looking things up, and at a couple of moments he simply throws up his hands. Why did so many people find it pleasing to be in O'Hara's company? he asks. That's ''the major mystery'' of O'Hara's personality, and remains ''unexplained.'' At another point, he says in exasperation, ''Sometimes I just can't like this man.''
Yet the picture he paints of O'Hara is a frequently endearing one, suggesting the doubts and anxieties behind the abrasiveness. O'Hara is so needy and so transparent in his snobbery and social climbing -- with his Rolls and his tweeds, his collection of club ties and rosettes (many from clubs he didn't belong to) -- that you can't help forgiving him. And Wolff reminds us that in his later years O'Hara mellowed considerably. His second and third marriages -- to Belle Wylie, with whom he had a daughter, Wylie, and, after Belle died, to her friend Katharine Barnes (known as Sister) -- were extremely happy ones. Wealthy and more or less contented, O'Hara settled into a life of uxorious country squiredom, first in Quogue, on Long Island, and then in Princeton. He gave up drinking, on doctor's orders, and became so serene, Wolff gently proposes, that it was actually bad for his work. Like a lot of writers, O'Hara wrote best when he had something to prove.
O'Hara had three great themes: class, sex and drinking. The last two he taught himself; the first was his birthright. He was born in 1905 in Pottsville, Pa., the eldest of eight children in a prosperous and prominent local family. His father, Patrick, was a hot-tempered but accomplished physician, legendary for his skill at skull surgery. The O'Haras lived on Mahantongo Street, the town's fanciest address, in a mansion that formerly belonged to the Yuengling brewing family; they owned five automobiles, a show farm and a string of horses; they were members of the Pottsville Club and the Schuylkill Country Club. Yet they were Irish and they were Catholic, and this -- in O'Hara's mind, anyway -- meant that they never quite belonged. He grew up with an acute awareness of all the tiny indicators of rank in the social hierarchy -- the clothes, the slang, the fraternity pins and handshakes -- and he studied them the way the Duc de Saint-Simon studied the wigs and the chair placement at the court of the Sun King. He also grew up with that most precious of writerly gifts: a sense of place. He learned every inch of Pottsville and the surrounding coal country and eventually recreated it, lovingly and fastidiously, in his fictional Gibbsville -- a miniature world as complete as Yoknapatawpha, only without the mythologizing.
What Princeton was for Fitzgerald, Yale was for the young O'Hara -- the magical, beckoning realm where he believed he would finally come into his own. But he was a wretched student, bouncing from one second-rate prep school to another until, in 1925, his father died intestate and left the family virtually penniless. O'Hara reluctantly gave up his dreams of New Haven -- he saw no point in going unless he could go in the proper style -- and for the rest of his life he fantasized about which Yale clubs he might have belonged to, which secret society would have tapped him; amazingly, as late as 1935, when he had already published three books, he was still talking about enrolling as a Yale pre-med.
In fact, his non-matriculation probably saved him from becoming a truly insufferable snob (and not just a yearning wannabe). Instead of Yale, he got one of those classic, rough-and-tumble educations that have been the making of so many American writers. He was variously a railroad worker, a waiter on an ocean liner, a P.R. man, a hotel night clerk and, most crucially, a newspaper reporter, first in Pennsylvania and then in New York, where he worked for The Herald Tribune and The Daily Mirror. In many ways O'Hara was a terrible newspaperman -- he was always getting fired for being hung over or for disappearing on benders -- but the job taught him a reporter's reverence for facts. ''He had a feral appetite to know things, especially secrets,'' Wolff says, and in time an exactness of detail and preciseness of reference became one of the hallmarks of his writing, together with an acute ear for dialogue and a style so plain and so clear that it sometimes seemed like no style at all.
In 1928, while working at The Trib, he sold his first piece -- a ''casual,'' or humorous sketch -- to the then fledgling New Yorker, and thus began an association with the magazine that lasted almost 40 years. It was a vexed relationship on both sides, even though O'Hara, like Thurber, E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs and Dorothy Parker, quickly became one of the magazine's big drawing cards. Harold Ross, the founder of The New Yorker, couldn't stand O'Hara personally, and published his work only grudgingly. Katharine White, the fiction editor, understood the value and importance of O'Hara's writing, but lectured and condescended to him. It wasn't until O'Hara began to work with William Maxwell in the late 30's that he finally had a New Yorker editor who loved and appreciated him, and by then it was too late. Out of defensiveness and self-importance, O'Hara had already cultivated the habits -- the lofty and imperious letters, the refusal to rewrite, the stubbornness about changing even a single mark of punctuation -- that made him so difficult to deal with.
Most of O'Hara's really bad behavior stemmed from drinking, and he wasn't alone. He belonged to that hard-living generation of American writers (especially well represented on the the New Yorker staff) for whom drinking meant not just a few cocktails after work; it meant disappearing for two or three days at a time and waking up with no recollection of what you had done and said. Reading Wolff's account of those long, woozy evenings at Bleeck's or ''21,'' you sometimes wonder how any writing got done at all. But for O'Hara, alcohol was also an essential part of what he wrote about: it's the volatile fuel that propels many of his novels, especially the first two, ''Appointment in Samarra'' and ''Butterfield 8.'' In those books, both of which are set during Prohibition, booze is, first of all, a dangerous solvent eating away at the very foundations of the social order -- because to be a drinker, no matter how proper you were, was by definition to be a lawbreaker, forced to associate with bootleggers or frequent speak-easies. Even the seemingly innocent mixing of a country club cocktail brought with it the faint whiff of corruption. For certain doomed characters, moreover -- people like the self-destructive Julian English in ''Appointment,'' and Weston Liggett, the bored stockbroker in ''Butterfield'' -- a drink (or five or six) is like the potion that turns Jekyll into Hyde; it literally transforms you, bit by bit revealing the monster lurking inside, from whom friends and family flinch and turn away.
Drink, even in moderation, also makes O'Hara's people libidinous. ''Appointment'' was a scandalously sexy book when it first came out, in 1934, and even today it has a surprising raciness, as when Julian recalls the sound his wife, the well-bred Caroline, makes during orgasm: ''He knew, and not another human being knew, that she cried 'I' or 'high' in moments of great ecstasy.'' Even more remarkable is the novel's opening, when Luther Fliegler, the story's Everyman character, and his wife make love, while slightly hung over, on Christmas morning. This is, I'm pretty sure, the first explicit sex scene between a married couple in all of American literature. Before O'Hara nice girls didn't have sex -- not in polite fiction -- and even married ones weren't supposed to like it. His great revelation -- though it seems obvious now -- was that women are sexual creatures every bit as much as men. In some of his later novels he took this notion too far and made a caricature of it -- in characters like the nymphomaniacal Grace Caldwell Tate in ''A Rage to Live,'' or the rapacious lesbian Lovey Childs in the novel of the same name -- but in the earlier books and in the stories it had a liberating effect and enabled O'Hara to create unusually complex and sympathetic female characters.
Wolff is hard on the later novels, and in particular on the jumbo doorstoppers -- like ''A Rage to Live'' ''Ten North Frederick'' and ''From the Terrace'' -- with which he made his fame and fortune in the 40's and 50's. O'Hara's first two novels are better, it's true (so much so that they give his career a backward-looking trajectory), but the late ones are still intensely readable and they have a certain documentary fascination. Wolff gets some factual things wrong: William Maxwell's older brother lost a leg, not an arm, in a carriage accident, for example, and The New Yorker's system of bonus payments, though it was insanely complicated, never took into account the amount of fan mail an author received. But Wolff's only serious failing, if you're already an O'Hara fan, is that he tends to undervalue -- or, at any rate, to undersell -- the importance of O'Hara's short stories, an enormous body of work that constitutes his real claim on our attention. It's not just that a good number of these stories -- pieces like ''Graven Image,'' ''The Doctor's Son'' and ''Over the River and Through the Woods'' -- are classics, worthy of inclusion in any serious anthology of 20th-century short fiction. O'Hara was also a formal innovator, who liberated the story from the formulas of popular magazine fiction of the 20's -- the reliance on surprise climaxes; the elaborately articulated structure of beginning, middle and end. Perhaps because he began by writing sketches, O'Hara discovered a kind of story that had no ending at all, and sometimes no proper beginning either -- a story in which nothing ''happens'' necessarily, but in which a line of dialogue or even a single observed detail indicates that something crucial has changed. Hemingway typically gets credit for this revolution in story writing, but among practitioners O'Hara was probably more influential. He created what later came to be called ''the New Yorker story'' -- one that turns on a tiny alteration in tone or mood -- and he paved the way for Salinger, Cheever, Updike and even Carver.
Where did O'Hara come from, artistically speaking? In part, obviously, from Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who were friends and contemporaries. But he's less mannered than the former (the simplicity of his language never calls attention to itself), less high-flown and romantic than the latter. Is it possible that what we're hearing, filtered into the American idiom, are echoes of Chekhov and Turgenev? Wolff doesn't say, and it's likely that O'Hara wasn't aware of it. Like Cheever, a fellow dropout and autodidact, O'Hara was an artful but unreflective writer. He was so busy keeping a jealous eye on what his competitors were up to that he seldom bothered to analyze what he was doing himself. He wrote, he turned in his manuscripts and he waited impatiently for the checks -- which to his mind were never big enough.
Charles McGrath is the editor of the Book Review

O'Hara At 'Home'

minecountry

O'Hara's work endures time and criticism

by Christine Goldbeck, Editor

There are 6 photos in this photo gallery. follow this link to view them all.

Author John O'Hara.
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A scene from the John O'Hara Walking Tour. "Gibbsville" street signs illustrate local places found in O'Hara's stories and novels. Photo by Christine Goldbeck
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The Coal and Iron Building in O'Hara's fiction is the Reading Anthracite Co. building on Mahantongo Street. Photo by Christine Goldbeck
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Schuylkill County is celebrating John O'Hara's centennial in 2005 through various events. Click here for information. Meanwhile, at the Pennsylvania State University, home to the O'Hara papers, an exhibition, "John O'Hara: A Centennial Exhibit" opened November 7 in the Special Collections Exhibition Hall. The exhibition will run through January 31, 2006. Finally, I cannot help but wonder what O'Hara would think of new media and the fact that he is the subject of a blog. Do visit Richard Carreno's John O'Hara Society Speaking of new media, do bookmark this article, which, as a hypertext, is what we new media practitioners call a "living document." That's really just industry-speak for an article that will change as information is added and linked. Thirty-five years after his death, John O’Hara’s name remains more than a whisper in the news. This attests to the interesting facts about the life of the late Schuylkill County author and the enduring nature of his literary work. John Henry O’Hara was born January 31, 1905, the eldest of eight children to Dr. Patrick Henry and Katherine Elizabeth (Delaney) O’Hara. John’s paternal grandfather was Michael O’Hara, of Shenandoah. Michael O’Hara came to America as a child in the early 1830s and lived in Reading with his parents. He married Mary E. Franey, a Shenandoah girl, on July 5, 1864. According to one biographer, Michael met Mary when he came to deliver bad news of a fallen Civil War soldier.
John O’Hara is famous locally because he used Pottsville and other Schuylkill County towns as the setting of his many short stories, novellas and novels. He renamed Schuylkill County “Lantenengo County” in his works. He called Pottsville “Gibbsville” in tribute to his favorite New York editor Wolcott Gibbs, and took it upon himself, as many fiction writers do, to make up names for many other real places in the hard coal region.
The O’Haras enjoyed a comfortable life, first at 125 Mahantongo Street in Pottsville and later at 606 Mahantongo, a building first owned by the Yuengling family. In 1982, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission placed a historical marker in front of the building at 606 Mahantongo Street.
John attended Miss Katie Carpenter’s, a private day nursery, and then Saint Patrick’s, where the Sisters of Saint Joseph put him in shape to be an altar boy and to become a writer.
Despite dancing classes, his horse Julia, the family farm in Panther Valley and other refinements, John was aware of the social differences about which he would write as an adult. This had to do with the fact that the O’Hara family was Irish Catholic. Irish immigrants were not seen in the best of light. After all, it had not been very long since the so-called Molly Maguires were hanged for crimes against mine supervisors and operators.
Doctor O’Hara thought his son had the hands of a surgeon. Young John had different designs for his life. The two personalities, actually much alike, clashed often. After being stripped of honors he would have received at Niagara University Prep School, where Doctor O’Hara had done his undergraduate work, O’Hara and the Doctor drifted even further apart.
O’Hara began his writing career in 1924 as a utility reporter for The Pottsville Journal. The Doctor imposed on his friend, Harry Silliman, the owner, to give his son a job.
When his father suddenly died of Bright’s Disease, the O’Hara family was left with no money and no breadwinner. Doctor Patrick, although skilled as a physician, was not “good with money,” to quote a local phrase.
John O’Hara, then 20, badly wanted to attend Yale; however, the death of Dr. O’Hara made that out of the question. In the years before his literary success, he worked in Chicago as an evaluating engineer, a steel mill worker, a soda jerk, and a gas meter reader among other jobs. In New York City, he was a rewrite man for the Daily Mirror, a movie critic for the Morning Telegraph, a staff writer at Time magazine, and had held other writing and editing positions.
His big break came in 1934 with the publication of his first novel, “Appointment in Samarra.” Only a year later, his autobiographical story “The Doctor’s Son,” cited by fans and critics alike as one of his best works, was published as part of a collection of his short stories.
Not all local citizens liked what he wrote about his “Pennsylvania Protectorate.” In fact, almost three quarters of a century ago, O’Hara’s books were not placed on the shelf in Pottsville Free Public Library because they were considered indecent for their portrayal of the area and because they contained adult content.
Today, this library has 149 O’Hara volumes of 41 O’Hara titles. Only 80 of the books circulate. The rest are in the library’s “Local History Room” to ensure that the library always has a copy of each of the books.
Pottsville also now has a bronze statue of the author and Gibbsville street markers. Above the sign designating Mahantongo Street, is a decorative sign declaring it “Lantenengo Street,” the title O’Hara gave this residential street in his many works about the area. To fans throughout the world, O’Hara told the truth about people and life. O’Hara enthusiasts are hard-pressed to name their favorite of his essays, his stories and his novels. Those who believe he was among the best of America’s 20th century authors say his ability to write dialogue and his talent for description are among the skills he repeatedly showed himself master of in his work.
In talking about O’Hara books, dissenters and fans alike have many books from which to choose. O’Hara wrote 16 novels and 402 short stories. More than 40 million copies of his books were sold by the time of his death at age 65. Several of his bestsellers were made into major motion pictures, including: “Butterfield 8” with Elizabeth Taylor; “From the Terrace” with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; “Pal Joey,” for which he won a Screen Writer’s Award; and “Ten North Frederick” with Gary Cooper. The novel “Ten North Frederick” won the National Book Award in 1956. O’Hara also had a radio show and wrote essays on cultural and political topics.
“I must have read each of them five times,” said Dr. David A. Morowitz, M.D., who practices medicine in Washington D.C. and Chevy Chase, Md., and who visited Pottsville for the first time in October 2000, for a John O’Hara Weekend. “And, it’s not like we’re talking about James Joyce, who put out, what, about three major works? O’Hara really put them out. On a manual typewriter.”
O’Hara did for northeastern Pennsylvania, and particularly the hard coal region, what writers before him, such as Sherwood Anderson, who wrote “Winesburg, Ohio” had done; he recorded the social history of a place and time. In addition to Schuylkill County, he also wrote New York City, Hollywood, and Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County, home to Harrisburg, the state capitol, which O’Hara named Fort Penn, into his novels.
His stories are social history lessons that chronicle the lives and times of people in the early part of the 20th century. To read O’Hara is to know, beyond doubt, what people wore, where they worked and how much they earned, to which clubs they belonged, what kinds of automobiles they drove and what games they played.
“The ‘20s and ‘30s and the ‘40s are already history, but I cannot be content to leave their story in the hands of the historians and the editors of picture books,” O’Hara once said. “I want to record the way people talked and felt and thought, and to do with complete honesty and variety.”
As for the Gibbsville cycle of his work, there is no doubt that O’Hara remembered well what he saw, heard and felt while growing up in Schuylkill County. Consider this passage from page 49 in “Appointment in Samarra”: “The anthracite region lies roughly between Scranton on the north and Gibbsville (Pottsville) on the south. In fact, Point Mountain (Sharp Mountain), upon which Gibbsville’s earliest settlement was made, is the delight of geologists, who come from as far away as Germany to examine Gibbsville Conglomerate (Pottsville Conglomerate, a stone formation found nowhere else in the world. When that geological squeeze, or whatever it was that produced veins of coal, occurred, it did not go south of Point Mountain, and coal is found on the north slope of Point Mountain, but not the south side, and at the eastern face of Point Mountain is found Gibbsville Conglomerate. The richest veins of anthracite in the world are within a thirty-mile sector from Gibbsville, and when those veins are being worked, Gibbsville prospers. When the mines are idle, Gibbsville puts on a long face and begins to think in terms of soup kitchens.”
In an interview with John K. Hutchens, published on Dec. 4, 1955 in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, O’Hara was asked if Pottsville and Gibbsville were the same towns. O’Hara answered: “The across-the-tracks stuff, the canal, the railroad, are where I have placed them. Ethnologically, too, as well as topographically, I have stayed close to the facts of Pottsville.”
As for whether his characters were real people in Pottsville, in the same interview, O’Hara said that a few minor characters are all but photographed “to populate a party, say. But beyond that, or above it, I go in for disguises. I use the psychological pattern of a real person, then cover him up with the superficial aspects of another.”
The criticism about his work extends beyond whether he wrote facts about Schuylkill County and its citizens in his fictional work. The literary value of his work is also subject to intense debate. Decades following his death on April 11, 1970, at his estate, Linebrook, in Princeton, NJ, critics opine that his work lacked the depth of his contemporaries, among them John Steinbeck, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
“I went into a little period where I thought I was getting a little snotty, where I was thinking that if I can read and understand a book, then it was not good. I thought ‘he can’t be much good because I can understand him.’ Fortunately, that didn’t last long. I realized good writing does not have to be difficult to understand. Good writing just has to be good writing,” Morowitz said.
Erica Ramus, publisher of Schuylkill Living Magazine realized how important O’Hara is to modern American literature when she left the area briefly to go to school. “I started reading John O‘Hara in college and I was hooked. I was impressed that my teachers in New Mexico--then at the University of Delaware--had read O'Hara. I had assumed he was a local writer not well known, and was impressed to find him being read outside the area. I wish more Schuylkill Countians would take an interest in his writings. He's not just a local phenomenon--he's a celebrated author known well outside of Gibbsville.”
Throughout the last three decades, O’Hara’s regional fans, including Ramus and Schuylkill County Commissioner Mantura Gallagher, have made efforts to keep his name alive. Dr. Vincent D. Balitas, Pottsville, wrote The John O’Hara Journals. The Schuylkill County Council for the Arts, in Pottsville, staged O’Hara weekends at which his works were discussed and dramatized. These events have been revived.
Usually, the annual O’Hara weekend occurs in October; however, in marking his centennial this year, various organizations, including the Pottsville Free Public Library and the Schuylkill County Council for the Arts, have been hosting various events to mark what would have been his 100th.
In 1995, Modern Library, a division of Random House that reprints classic books, released a hardcover version of “Appointment in Samarra.” Three years later, when The Modern Library released its 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century, “Appointment in Samarra” was number 22. According to The Modern Library, “the reader’s poll for the best novels published in the English language since 1900 opened on July 20, 1998 and closed on October 20, 1998, with 217,520 votes cast.”
Although the economic landscape of Schuylkill County has changed drastically since O’Hara’s childhood, some sites and locations about which O’Hara wrote have changed little. Visitors will find that Pottsville’s Mahantongo Street still has mansions that stood in O’Hara’s boyhood days. Other sites are gone.
For example, a March 2001 fire gutted a Queen-Anne-East Lake style town house located at 430 S. Centre St. in Pottsville. According to the Pottsville Republican and Evening Herald in a March 22 story about the fire that destroyed it, in the 1880s this building was the home of prominent entrepreneur William Lesley Sheafer. Mr. Sheafer’s son, Clinton, who was raised in the house, was the model for a character named Whit Hoffman in “Appointment in Samarra.”
Renewed interest in O’Hara has increased the value of his books. First edition printings of “Appointment in Samarra” sell for $1,500 and more. “The Second Ewings,” the novel on which he was working hours before he died, contains 74 pages issued as unbound sheets in a box with a label, and it is offered at $130.50 and higher.
Issues of The New Yorker in which his stories were published cost $50 and more, depending upon the seller and condition of the issues. Other titles sell for $25 and under, but none as low of the cost when they were first published.
Many of his books, including translations in German, French and other languages, can be viewed at the Penn State University’s Patee-Paterno Library in State College, where O’Hara’s Linebrook Study is re-created. There, visitors may see the Remington Noiseless on which he wrote his novels and stories and the Remington Noiseless portable on which “Appointment in Samarra” was created.
The John O’Hara Papers also are located in the university’s Special Collections Department, Rare Books and Manuscripts. For more information about visiting the study and for information about access to his papers, professional and personal, click here or call 814-865-1793.
The Schuylkill County Council for the Arts is another source for information about O’Hara. Contact the arts center in writing at 1440 Mahantongo Street, Pottsville, PA., 17901 or call 570-622-2788.
Reliable details about O’Hara are also available on the Internet. Visit John O'Hara: The Mighty and Enduring Pen for the list of fictional names O’Hara gave regional towns in his books.
The SCCA and the Pottsville Republican & Evening Herald are also sources of information about another of the coal region’s famous authors, Conrad Richter, a native of Pine Grove (16 miles from Pottsville), who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Town.” In a tribute to the elder scribe, O’Hara renamed Pine Grove “Richterville” in the Gibbsville cycle of his work.
O’Hara’s epitaph, written by his own hand, states “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.”
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bruccoli, MatthewJ., ed. “An Artist is His Own Fault” John O’Hara on Writers and Writing. Southern Illinois University Press, 1977.
Bruccoli, MatthewJ., ed. Gibbsville, PA The Classic Stories. New York, Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., 1992.
Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Selected Letters of John O’Hara. New York: Random House, 1978.
Farr, Finis. O’Hara A Biography. Boston: Little. Brown and Company, 1973.
Goldleaf, Steven. John O’Hara A Study of the Short Fiction.New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.
Long, Robert Emmet. John O’Hara. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983.
MacArthur, Pamela C. Images of America John O’Hara’s Anthracite Region. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1999.
MacShane, Frank. Collected Stories of John O’Hara. New York: Random House, 1984.
MacShane, Frank. The Life of John O’Hara. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980.
O’Hara, John. Appointment in Samarra. New York: Random House, 1934, Vintage Books Edition, 2003. *(Contains an introduction by John Updike, native of Shillington, Berks County, and a prolific fiction author.)
O’Hara, John. A Rage to Live. New York: Random House, 1949.
O’Hara, John. And Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1966.
O’Hara, John. Assembly. New York: Random House, 1960, 1961.
O’Hara, John. Files on Parade. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939.
O’Hara, John. From The Terrace. New York: Random House, 1958.
O’Hara, John. My Turn. New York: Random House, 1964.
O’Hara, John. Ourselves to Know. New York: Random House, 1960.
O’Hara, John. Sermons and Soda-Water. New York: Random House, 1960.
O’Hara, John. Ten North Frederick. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1955, 1985.
O'Hara, John. The Farmers Hotel. New York: Random House, 1951.
O'Hara, John. The Lockwood Concern. New York: Random House, 1965.
Schuylkill Living Magazine. John O'Hara Issue. Pottsville: Fall 2002.
Wolff, Geoffrey. The Art of Burning Bridges A Life of John O’Hara. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Select Electronic Resources
PA Center for the Book has made a map of Lantenengo County. Visit O'Hara literature map.
(Note: One may wish to perform Internet searches for articles written about O’Hara. Numerous are the stories that have been published in the Pottsville Republican and Evening Herald newspaper. With the 2003 publication of the Wolff biography, newspapers throughout the nation published reviews and stories about O'Hara.)



Copyright © 1998-2005 by Eric McKeever/Christine Goldbeck. All Rights Reserved


At Penn State

Library Celebrates O'Hara Centennial
STATE COLLEGE, PA -- Professor Philip B. Eppard,
of the University of Albany, SUNY, spoke 7
November on 'The Posthumous Lives of John
O'Hara.'

Professor Eppard, who is on the faculty of the
School of Information Science and Policy, is the
editor of Critical Essays on John O'Hara and the
co-editor of many bibliographies of American
literature. He examined the different approaches
O'Hara's biographers have taken and consider how
their studies have enhanced our understanding of
O’Hara’s literary achievements and influenced his
reputation.

Novelist and short-story writer O'Hara
(1905-1970) was born in Pottsville, PA. Although
he left the state as a young man, he set five
novels and more than 50 stories in
Pennsylvania, many in a fictional town called
Gibbsville. O'Hara was a regular contributor to
The New Yorker and wrote some 400 short stories
in addition to 19 novels. Five of his novels were
made into big-budget motion pictures, including
Butterfield 8 and Pal Joey.

The lecture was sponsored by the Huck Chair for
Special Collections, the Penn State Center for
the History of the Book, and the Pennsylvania
Center for the Book. A reception will follow in
the Mann Assembly Room.

A related exhibition, 'John O’Hara: A Centennial
Exhibit' also opened on 7 November in the Special
Collections Library. Timothy Babcock, a Rare
Books and Manuscripts intern from the Syracuse
University School of Information Studies, curated
the exhibit from the John O'Hara Papers and from
our extensive holdings of O'Hara's works.

The Special Collections Library,104 Paterno
Library, is open Monday-Thursday, 8:00 a.m.-6:30
p.m.; and Friday, 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. The
exhibition will run through January 31, 2006.

If You Visit

At Paterno Library

EXHIBITS AND EVENTS
November 7, 2005 –January 31, 2006
John O’Hara: A Centennial Exhibition

Novelist and short-story writer John O'Hara
(1905–1970) was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania,
in the state's northeastern anthracite coal
region. Although he left Pennsylvania as a young
man, he set five novels and more than fifty
stories in what he called "my Pennsylvania
Protectorate." The characters of O'Hara's
fictional town of Gibbsville were the miners and
poor immigrants, the bartenders, the country-club
set, and the college-bred middle class of his
hometown.

But O'Hara was more than just a Pennsylvania
writer; he was a writer of national stature.
O'Hara was a regular contributor to The New
Yorker and wrote some four hundred short stories
in addition to nineteen novels. Five of his
novels were made into big-budget motion pictures,
including and Pal Joey. Ten North Frederick won a
National Book Award in 1956, and in 1964 O'Hara
received a Gold Medal of Merit from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters.

Timothy Babcock, a Rare Books and Manuscripts
intern from the Syracuse University School of
Information Studies, has made the selection of
exhibition materials from the John O'Hara Papers
and from O’Hara's published works. Penn State's
O'Hara holdings include letters, manuscripts,
photographs, book contracts, and the entire
contents of his study, which has been
reconstructed adjacent to our Exhibition Hall.
The bulk of the O'Hara collection came to the
University Libraries as gifts from John O'Hara,
from his late wife, Katharine B. O'Hara, and from
his daughter, Wylie O'Hara Doughty, with
additional purchases by Rare Books and
Manuscripts.

For more information about the exhibit or about
the John O'Hara Papers, write to Rare Books and
Manuscripts, 104 Paterno Library, Pennsylvania
State University, University Park, PA 16802, or
call (814) 865-1793. To take a virtual tour of
the John O'Hara Study, go to
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/gateway/vtour/ohara.htm.

O'Hara's Philly


Appointment with O'Hara: Center City



By Richard Carreño
If you remember buying pink-colored button-down shirts at Brooks Brothers (when the real-deal Brethren of yore was at Chestnut and 15th); the old 'Y' off Broad (chockablock with GI's on leave or ready to ship out); the eery, back-in-the day feeling of Suburban Station (packed with Grace Kelley look-alikes in white gloves on Saturday shopping sprees), well, you're either an aging Baby Boomer about to go bust, or, perhaps, simply, a reader of John O'Hara.

John O'Hara who? You know, the John O'Hara who wrote Appointment in Samarra, BUtterfield 8, From the Terrace, A Rage to Live, and some the best American short stories in modern times (see Sermoms and Soda Water). Still, a little iffy?

Don't feel bad. Or, maybe you should. For O'Hara, the mid-20th century author, short story writer and playwright (yes, Pal Joey was among his oeuvre), is nothing less than arguably Pennsylvania's greatest modern literary titan. (No, that would not be John Updike. He moved from Shilling, Pa., years ago to Massachusetts' North Shore). O'Hara, on the other hand, never really left the 'Region,' the area surounding his birthplace in Pottsville -- at least, not in a literary sense. Though success took him to New York (and The New Yorker magazine), later to Hollywood as a screen writer, and, finally, to Princeton, N.J., to a life as a 'country squire,' O'Hara's real spiritual home was Pennsylvania.

Throughout his 65 years, as well, Philadelphia was always front and center as he, personally, and his characters, fictionally, interacted with what was then an early-1900s-to-post-War city -- and one still deeply defined by its white-bread Establishment of Main Line bankers and lawyers and, yes, its crooked pols. (Some things never change). While Pottsville -- redubbed 'Gibbsville' -- was the heart of O'Hara Country, Philadelphia was its capital city.

Though out of the literary limelight (despite his local stature, one would hard pressed, even at Penn, to find him on the English Department reading list), O'Hara in 2005 -- 35 years after his death -- is not entirely forgotten. Time magazine, just last month, named Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934 as O'Hara's first blockbuster, as one of the best 100 American novels ever.

And, in a dramatic turn (for O'Hara had no great love for his birthplace in Schuylkill County's coal region), the city of Pottsville rolled out the red carpet earlier this month for a five-day celebration of the 100th anniversary of the author's birth in 1905. (O'Hara died, following a heart attack, in 1970 in Princeton and was buried there).

Among the Pottsville events were a ball at a local country club (shades of Appointment in Samarra, where key scenes occur at a local country club, per chance?); a dinner theatre; a screening of 'Ten North Frederick,' a film adaption starring Gary Cooper; and, best of all, a wonderfully-researched brochure that highlights O'Hara's Pottsville and environs. I also particularly liked a newly-installed life-sized bronze statue of the beefy author.

Pottsville and Schuylkill officials are on to something. What with Pottsville on its last legs (mining is long gone), they're now marketing their biggest star with gusto. Never mind that O'Hara considered Pottsville a backward pit of Philistines, and longed for the day when he'd see its best view -- that would be in a rear-view mirror. In his 20s, he did just that, and the town reciprocated with 'Good riddance.' (I suppose there's a bit of ironic justice in that the O'Hara statute, located on Centre Street, has the author gazing across the thoroughfare with a wincing 'got-cha' look).

O'Hara's gone-missing fate has a lot to do with two factors. One, his works are society-oriented about life among the upper classes and the rich. Contemporary critics -- the populist Alfred Kazin was among the most severe -- simply dismissed O'Hara as a novelist of manners. (I met Kazin in the early '90s, shortly before death, at Harvard, and he was still sputtering venom against O'Hara. Go figure).

Unlike the old Hemingway, the young Mailer, and even satirist Philip Barry (author of The Philadelphia Story), the knock on O'Hara was that he chronicled ga-ga twice-told tales of the louche upper classes. Oh hum.

Another O'Hara 'concern' was his personality. By all accounts, he wasn't engaging. OK. He was disliked -- hugely disliked. He had few friends, and those he did have often turned against him. He was a mean drunk, a snob with lowly affectations (a black-thorne walking stick, for instance), and, -- although a target himself of early 20th-century bigotry as a Irish Catholic -- he was less than compassionate with those he refered to as 'Lawrence Welk people.' In O'Hara's charmed world, people were divided between those who bought their own household furniture and those who inherited their furnishings. No need to ask which side O'Hara identified with.

Recently, I got to wondering why Pottsville should have all the fun, claiming O'Hara as a native son, and all, when Philadelphia, by rights, has more than a few dibbs on the author, as well. Moreover, wouldn't bragging rights to O'Hara -- or, at least, his literary reputation -- goose the city's gritty image?

These thoughts were originally triggered earlier this year when I met Sue Gould, president of the Philadelphia City Institute Library. Gould had met O'Hara in the 1950s. ('I was charmed,' she said). Gould had also just finished reading a new O'Hara biography, and, now, was less than charmed. ('If you like to read about drunks with literary talents, he's your man,' she also remarked, in a PCI newsletter about the same time we met).

'O'Hara was intrigued by social differences, class distinctions,' Gould said. 'He once remarked that the 4:35 commuter train from Philadelphia got the well-to-do home in time for dinner and the less well-off late for supper.'. (Turn toTen North Frederick for that quip.). Gould also remembered that O'Hara's favorite hotel was the Warwick, the Racquet Club was his in-town club, and that, notably, that Washington Square was the venue of a frequently-told tale involving a stumble and a head injury that plagued the author for years.

The Warwick. The Racquet Club. Washington Square. Hmm.

If Pottsville could have its walking tour of O'Hara country, I thought why shouldn't Philadelphia? Despite a current building boom, much of O'Hara territory -- places where the author and his characters often frequented -- still exist. What follows, then, is an eclectic, arbitrary catalog of main O'Hara 'literary sites,' culled from the author's life and fiction. Not surprisingly, many tour sites date to another Philadelphia building boom period in the '20s and '30s.

But at least one prominent site from that period no longer exists, Broad Street Station. Like Art Deco-styled Suburban, 30th Street Station (a neo-Classical pile formerly known as Penn Station), and Reading Terminal on Market East, Broad was another major terminus for O'Hara's Main Line folk to arrive in the city. While Broad Street station is gone (thanks to Ed Bacon and his unforgiving bulldozers), fortunately Suburban, 30th Street, and Reading, now all restored, thrive. (More than 100,000 people use Suburban each day, as a matter of fact!)

Broad and Penn stations were also transportation hubs for O'Hara's Philadelphians returning from obligatory shopping and business trips to New York. On one such occasion, as recounted inTen North Frederick, two of these prominent Philadelphians, in addition to an admiral, were met at Broad Street Station by a naval car. The admiral took the two men to the Union League Club (140 South Broad Street) for dinner. Later, one of the men retires to the venerable Philadelphia Club (1301 Walnut Street) to play an arcane card game known as 'sniff.'

O'Hara figures are always trolling Center City. They had offices in South Broad Street, had shoes polished by a bootblack in the Land Title Building (Chestnut and Broad), shopped at Bailey, Banks & Biddle (now H&M at 15th and Chestnut) and Brooks Brothers, dined at Bookbinder's (formerly on 15th, between Walnut and Locust), or met business clients (or girlfriends, as in 'Afternoon Waltz') at the Bellevue-Stratford (now the Bellevue) on South Broad. Lovey Childs, the Lovey of Lovey Childs: A Philadelphian's Story, also favored the old Bellevue -- for lunch with her good friend Grace Wells.

Indeed, O'Hara and his figures would still recognize much of Center City, especially along South Broad. (Though one wonders what they would make of the Kimmel Center and the Girard Bank converted into a hotel!)

'Philadelphia was so much part of the Gibbsville middle- and upper-class life,' reports one of O'Hara's omniscient narrators, 'that when Gibbsvillians saw each other on Chestnut Street, they bowed and smiled....' O'Hara even created -- I suppose to sidestep calumny -- his own Philadelphia newspaper -- the Sun.

Philadelphia looms large in the short story 'Andrea.' The eponymous Andrea, an out-of-town naif, simply doesn't get it 'Don't call it U. of Penn,' Peter Hofman admonishes. 'Penn, or U. of P., but not the U. of Penn. Ugh.'

Andrea's downfall, while still living in Gibbsville, had been at the hands (and other parts) of another Philadelphian philanderer. 'The next week, on a Tuesday afternoon, Andrea came to [my] apartment on Walnut Street, and I committed statutory rape,' he relates. Six years and ten years later (the character is now living on Spring Garden Street), he has other flings with Andrea. '[S]he was the only woman I could not do without.'

Andrea wasn't as smitten, however. Her other lovers were denizens of Rittenhouse Square and members of the First Troop,Philadelphia City Cavalry, a high-Society riding club which still maintains its 'clubhouse' and museum in an Armory on 21st Street, between Market and Chestnut.

O'Hara's personal attachment to Philadelphia was equally strong. Whether living in New York, Los Angeles, or Princeton, he was a frequent visitor to the city. Some stays were on business, and he would be at the Warwick (17th Street, between Walnut and Locust). During a try-out of Pal Joey at the Forrest Theater (Walnut, between 11 and 12 streets), O'Hara and Budd Schulberg were sharing a suite at the hotel. The author was drinking heavily at the time, and an evening at the Pen and Pencil Club, the prominent writers club on Latimer Street (between 15th and 16th) was typical. That is, almost ending in a fight. Schulberg ushered him out and walked him back to the nearby Warwick.

When not hanging at the Pen and Pencil (the oldest press club in America, by the way), another favorite O'Hara haunt was the bar at the old Hotel Adelphia, across the street, at 13th and Chestnut, from the former John Wanamaker department store, now Lord & Taylor.

In his later years, O'Hara found other reasons to visit the city. He frequently attended performances of the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music and, more significant, to see an old friend, Mayor Richardson Dilworth. Dilworth had recently moved to his neo-colonial house, now known as the Dilworth House, on Washington Square. The routine during these visits involved O'Hara parking his garrish Rolls Royce in the garage of Hopkinson House, also on Washington Square. This was where O'Hara suffered a fateful fall that required hospitalization at Pennsylvania Hospital, leading, as well, to an enduring period of doom and gloom.

Above all, the world of Philadelphia's private men's clubs especially fascinated O'Hara. Though O'Hara's characters were often members of the Philadelphia Club (still the city's most élite men's-only haunt and older, in fact, than many of London's legendary men's playpens), O'Hara's own attempts to join were fruitless. An Irishman. A Catholic. Hardly.

O'Hara understood fine distinctions among clubs. In The Lockwood Concern, the scion of a rich, but murderous father, asks a friend whether his son could ever make it in the Philadelphia Club. 'No Locky, he won't,' the friend says. 'Memories are too long.' In a letter to Richardson Dilworth, O'Hara writes, 'I personally have about much chance of getting a Nobel as I have of being made chairman of the Sniff Committee at the Philadelphia Club....'

Thanks to another Philadelphian, long-time friend and socialite Edgar Scott, O'Hara didn't get blackballed at the city's 'second best' club, the now 116-year-old Racquet, 215 South 16th Street. (Not surprisingly, many of O'Hara's most prominent fictional characters -- Samuel Eaton of From the Terrace is one -- were clubbed up at the Racquet).

O'Hara had little use for the Union League, however. Yes, it was Republican, old (founded in 1862), and conservative. Words that might describe O'Hara, as well -- when not tanked, that is. In O'Hara's convoluted mind, he had concluded that the Union League wasn't posh enough. Not even for his Republican blueblood pal Richardson Dilworth, he alluded in a letter to Scott.

Philadelphia was more than just places to O'Hara, however. The city itself often became a 'character' in his works. If a figure has an office on South Broad, nearby, perhaps, to the old Philadelphia Stock Exchange on Walnut, the reader immediately pigeonholes that character as a monied power broker. Instantaneously, thanks to O'Hara's coda, the reader establishes a composite. Does the character have clothes tailored at Brooks? Was his merchant banker Brown Brothers Harriman (still there at the corner of Walnut and 16th)? For O'Hara, these nuances were key in character development. Up and down Walnut and Chestnut, glimpses of these totems float by as specters on faded signs and branded bas-reliefs.

In the 1940s, the period O'Hara mined most assiduously, Philadelphia was still that kind of town: a huge industrial and financial engine, of 4-million, ruled grandees who ran the place almost by fiat. It was also still a city populated by what sociologist E. Digby Batzell called 'Proper Philadelphians' in his seminal work, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class.

Despite his wealth (O'Hara was a phenomenally popular author), literary standing, and connections (Dilworth was right up there on anybody's list), O'Hara was still, personally, only chipping away at that long-ago Philadelphia -- which didn't take kindly to Irish Catholic upstarts with allusions of grandeur. Fighting anxiety, an inferiority complex, and self-esteem issues, at the end of the day O'Hara was less a Philadelphia WASP than other another Philadelphian, his own creation, Pat Collins.

Like Collins, O'Hara really was just looking in. His nose pressed up to the glass. '[Collins] would walk or take the "El" from home in West Philadelphia to the area near City Hall, and wander about, stopping in front of hotels and clubs and private residences and theaters and the Academy of Music, staring at the limousines and town cars, engaging in conversation with chauffeurs; and then he would walk up North Broad Street, Automobile Row....'

O'Hara might have conquered Pottsville. But in Philadelphia, he still had a long way to go.

(This article, in a slightly different form, appeared in the Weekly Press of 9 November 2005).

Time's Best


24 October 2005
Time Magazine has designated Appointment in Samarra as among 10 'surprises' among its 100 'best' all time novels. 'Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He has a country-club membership and a loving wife. His decline and fall, over the course of three days around Christmas, is a matter of spending, liquor and a couple of reckless gestures. That his calamity is petty only makes it more powerful.'

The Last Word?

Teacher scribes encyclopedia item on O'Hara

By TOM COOMBE
Staff Writer
tcoombe@pottsville.infi.net

After years of research and a general interest in John O'Hara, Dr. Vincent D. Balitas wanted to write his "last word" on the author who is arguably Pottsville's most famous native son.

Balitas, Pottsville, got his chance with "The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America," published in January by Notre Dame Press.

The book outlines the contributions of Irish immigrants to nearly every area of life, including Balitas' page-and-a-half entry on the author, who was born and raised in Pottsville and became one of the country's best-known and most popular 20th century writers.

"I'd been working on him since I was a kid, when I started reading him," Balitas, a poet, teacher and founder of the now-defunct "John O'Hara Journal," said of the writer. "I wanted to write my final observation on John O'Hara."

The encyclopedia entry - outlining O'Hara's life and works and offering insight into his fiction - joins other Schuylkill County-related sections of the book.

Also included are passages on bandleader and Shenandoah native Tommy Dorsey, for whose band Frank Sinatra was once the vocalist; the Molly Maguires, the controversial group that allegedly perpetrated murder and other crimes in 19th century battles with mining interests; and the one on Pennsylvania itself, which discusses the role of the Irish in coal mining and the labor movement.

Michael Glazier, the encyclopedia's editor, said the book includes entries on the contributions made by the Irish all over the country. Glazier - himself a native of Kerry, Ireland - said he traveled to every state and most major cities to study the history of Irish immigrants.

"I was looking around and I found books on Irish-Americans," said Glazier. "They all seemed repetitive."

Also, according to Glazier, many existing books overlooked the role of the Irish in several areas.

Other studies looked at Ireland the country, but not what happened when its people came to America.

"There was a great need to bind the whole thing together," said Glazier. This book, he said, touches on the Irish and their place in politics, labor, science, Hollywood, crime, music and theater, to name a few.

Displaying obvious pride in the book and its contributors, Glazier still warns the book isn't "bedside reading." It's more of a reference book, he said, for people studying the Irish or families looking for their ancestors.

Still, the book is selling well, with one Irish-themed book store selling 120 copies, which isn't bad for a $90 encyclopedia, said Glazier. He said the encyclopedia could also benefit from the Internet, where online booksellers like Amazon.com stock books not available at normal book vendors.

Balitas said the book will offer people more exposure to O'Hara, maybe sparking more interest in an author whose works are becoming harder to find.

"I would call O'Hara a major-minor' writer," Balitas said from his book-lined living room, recalling the difficulty a fellow professor had in finding copies of O'Hara's novel "Appointment in Samarra."

"There's a book that was named one of the top 100 books of the century, and no one's reading it. There's something wrong," he said. "If you don't develop a readership in college, you won't have an audience."

With luck, Internet bookstores and people who read the encyclopedia and become curious about O'Hara could create more of an interest, said Balitas.



O'Hara Books




O'Hara Books Available from @philabooks+booksellers

Philadelphia.

A full range of books by John O'Hara, many of them first editions, is available from @philabooks+booksellers. The @philabooks link is listed on this page. At this time, we have not compiled an appropriate listing of all works available for sale. (This list is under construction) But we believe that that our inventory, known as eponymously as the Carreño Collection after Richard Carreño who developed the collection during more than 20 years, is among the most comprehensive anywhere. The Collection may be purchased as a whole. Please contact Richard Carreño at philabooks@yahoo.com, or at +215.563.6779, for quotes and details regarding individual titles.

Bruccoli Collection

The Matthew J. Bruccoli
John O'Hara Collection, 1927-1976

Inventory

Prepared by Brian K. DeLuca, November, 2002; revised December 2004
1 record storage box, 1 cubic foot, 11th floor

Biographical Note

John O'Hara was born in 1905 in Pottsville, Pennslyvania. He began his professional writing career as a reporter for one of Pottsville's two newspapers. His first novel, Appointment at Samarra, was published in 1935. This was followed in 1935 by another novel, Butterfield 8. Rage to Live was published in 1949 and met with tremendous commercial succes, but was critically panned. O'Hara wrote several other novels over the course of his life, but his short stories won him critical acclaim and praise. Possibly influenced by Sinclair Lewis and others, O'Hara was a social novelist whose works focused on the so-called "American Establishment." O'Hara died in 1970.

Matthew J. Bruccoli was born on August 21, 1931. He earned his Master's degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Bruccoli began work on a bibliography of John O'Hara's works while on the faculty at The Ohio State University. Bruccoli also published a biograhy of O'Hara 1975. Bruccoli is a specialist in modern American literature and is a renowned expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1962 Bruccoli joined with C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. to start Bruccoli Clark Layman to publish special limited editions of literary works. The company incorporated in 1976 and began producing the Dicitonary of Literary Biography. Bruccoli served as a Professor of English and the Director, Center for Editions of American Authors, at the University of South Carolina from 1969-1976. In 1976 he became the Jefferies Professor of English, University of South Carolina. Bruccoli is the author and editor of dozens of articles, bibliographies, biographies, and texts on major American writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, James Gould Cozzens, and John O'Hara.


Scope and Content

The Matthew J. Bruccoli John O'Hara Collection was donated to Kent State University in 1987. The collections consists of documents, corrospondence, and manuscripts pertaining to Bruccoli's research and publication of articles and other works on the author John O'Hara, primarily The O'Hara Concern : A Biography of John O'Hara (1975).

In addition to this collection of manuscript material, Dr. Bruccoli donated an extensive collection of O'Hara's books, all of which are cataloged in KentLINK. Playbills for Pal Joey are filed in the Playbill Collection.


Box 1

Folder-- Contents

Series 1 -- Manuscripts, notes and proofs of M. Bruccoli's various works on John O'Hara
  1. Manuscript: John O'Hara: A Descriptive Bibliography, M. Bruccoli, [n.d.]
  2. Manuscript: John O'Hara: A Descriptive Bibliography, M. Bruccoli, [n.d.]
  3. Typescript: John O'Hara: A Descriptive Bibliography, M. Bruccoli, [n.d.]
  4. Page Proofs: John O'Hara: A Descriptive Bibliography, M. Bruccoli, [n.d.]
  5. Photocopies: John O'Hara: A Descriptive Bibliography, M. Bruccoli, [n.d.]
  6. Untitled Essay: M. Bruccoli, [n.d.]
  7. Correspondence: from Marilyn Hails, Production editor, "Tough Guys" to M. Bruccoli, March 14, 1968
  8. Manuscript, page proofs, photocopies of essay, "Appointment at Samarra: The Importance of Knowing What You Are Talking About" by M. Bruccoli, 1968
  9. Front matter and notes from the O'Hara Concern by M. Bruccoli, 1975
Series 2 --Correspondence to M. Bruccoli pertaining to his research on John O'Hara
  1. Correspondence: from John O'Hara to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Oct, 21 1962
  2. Correspondence: from John O'Hara to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Jan. 8, 1963
  3. Correspondence: from John O'Hara to Matthew J. Bruccoli, June 26, 1963
  4. Correspondence: from John O'Hara to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Feb. 12, 1966
  5. Correspondence: from Donald S. Klopfer to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Jan. 22, 1963
  6. Correspondence: from Albert Erskine to Matthew J. Bruccoli, June 5, 1964
  7. Correspondence: from Albert Erskine to Matthew J. Bruccoli, July 3, 1964
  8. Correspondence: from Albert Ereskine to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Dec. 29, 1975
  9. Correspondence: from Esther Margolis to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Mar. 25 1975
  10. Correspondence: from Albert Erskine to L.L. Winship, Nov. 23, 1965
  11. Correspondence: from Albert Erskine to Sidney Jacobs, Dec. 2, 1965
  12. Correspondence: from Albert Erskine to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Dec. 9, 1965
  13. Correspondence: from Albert Erskine to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Jan. 22, 1970
  14. Correspondence: from K.B. O'Hara to Matthew J. Bruccoli, [n.d.]
  15. Correspondence: from F.A. Hetzel to H. Hobbs, April 14, 1965
  16. Correspondence: from A. Rota to Matthew J. Bruccoli, July 12, 1966
  17. Correspondence: from Bernard Quaritch, Ltd. to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Nov. 14, 1967
  18. Correspondence: from Bernard Quaritch, Ltd. to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Nov. 23, 1967
  19. Correspondence: from Howell, W.R. to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Nov. 29, 1967
  20. Correspondence: from G. Hilmer Lundbeck to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Feb. 2, 1973
  21. Correspondence: from Anthony Rota to Matthew J. Bruccoli, June 20, 1975
  22. Correspondence: from Frank Darchinger to Matthew J. Bruccoli, July 24,1975
  23. Correspondence: from Frank Darchinger to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Aug 27, 1975
  24. Correspondence: from Frank Darchinger to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Aug. 27, 1975
  25. Correspondence: from Matthew J. Bruccoli to H.W. Schwartz, Jan. 19 [n.d.]
  26. Correspondence: from George Frazier to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Dec. 5,1967
  27. Correspondence: from Philip B. Eppard to Matthew J. Bruccoli, July 2, 1975
  28. Correspondence: from Anthony Rota to Matthew J. Bruccoli, July 11, 1975
  29. Correspondence: from Hampton Books to Matthew J. Bruccoli, July 16,1975
  30. Correspondence: from Philip B. Eppard to Matthew J. Bruccoli, July 23,1975
  31. Correspondence: from Matthew J. Bruccoli to Norman Kane, July 28, N.D.
  32. Correspondence: from Linda Williams to Matthew J. Bruccoli, April 3, 1975
Series 3 -- Correspondence and papers of John O'Hara
  1. Tamaqua Pennsylvania Courier Payroll records, 2 pages, O'Hara Listed, 1927
  2. Telegram: from John O'Hara to Ruth Sato, Jan. 13, 1935
  3. Telegram: from John O'Hara to Ruth Sato, Jan. 23, 1935
  4. Correspondence: from John O'Hara to Ruth Sato, Feb. 10, 1935
  5. Contract between John O'Hara and Robert D. Andrews, proceeds from "Flight from Glory"
  6. Correspondence: from John O'Hara to Clifford Odets, July 4, 1953
Series 4 -- Other correspondence
  1. Correspondence: from George Frazier to Matthew J. Bruccoli, May 14, 1970
  2. Correspondence: from Charles W. Mann to Matthew J. Bruccoli, June 4, 1970
  3. Correspondence: from Charles W. Mann to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Photocopy of signed dedication in front of a book, July 27, 1970
  4. Correspondence: from W. Carl Jackson to Matthew J. Bruccoli, July 27, 1970
  5. Correspondence, newspaper article: from George Frazier to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Aug 28, 1970
  6. Correspondence: from Charles W. Mann to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Sept. 4, 1970
  7. Correspondence: from George Frazier to Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1970
  8. Correspondence: from Vernon Sternberg to Peter P. Mcn. Gates, Nov. 13, 1974
  9. Correspondence: from R.H. to Mrs. Louis Henry Cohn (Margie), Nov. 15, 1967
  10. Invitation: to Matthew J. Bruccoli to John O'Hara memorial service from Random House Publishers,May 13, 1970
  11. Correspondence: from Matthew J. Bruccoli to Charles W. Mann, May 14, 1970
  12. Correspondence: from Matthew J. Bruccoli to Charles W. Mann, June 8, 1970
  13. Correspondence: from Matthew J. Bruccoli to Lynn Strong, March 18, 1975
  14. Correspondence: from Vernon Sternberg to U.S. Trust Company of New York, March 19, 1975
  15. Correspondence: from Donald S. Klopfer to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Sept. 9, 1975
  16. Correspondence: from Ruth Sato to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Oct. 24, 1975
  17. Correspondence: from B. Barbara Friedberg to Matthew J. Bruccoli, Feb. 15, 1976
Series 5 -- Miscellaneous materials
  1. "Friend of Princeton University Library" letter, from Richard M. Huber, Feb. 13, 1967
  2. Correspondence: from Mac E. Barrick to Matthew J. Bruccoli, and a booklet entitled "Proverbs and Sayings from Gibbsville, PA. John O'Hara's use of proverbial materials", by Mac E. Barrick, Sept. 7, 1967
  3. Correspondence: from T. J_____ to _________,Sept. 29, 1975, includes photocopied material
  4. Review of Matthew J. Bruccoli's "The O'Hara Concern", by Hoke Norris, 1975
  5. Caricature of John O'Hara: artist unknown, [n.d.]
  6. Play: "The General's Return from One Place to Another", by "John O'Hara", note by John O'Hara on front indicating that play is not his and note by Matthew J. Bruccoli on verso of last page indicating the same, [n.d.]
Series 6 -- Photographs (used in The O'Hara Concern)
  1. Photographs and jacket designs for The O'Hara Concern
  2. Photographs and jacket designs for The O'Hara Concern