John O'Hara

American · 1905 to 1970

John O'Hara was born on January 31, 1905, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the eldest son of a respected small-town physician in an Irish Catholic family that lived, uneasily, on the edge of a Protestant social world it could never fully enter. His father wanted him to become a doctor and go to Yale, and O'Hara grew up assuming both would happen. Neither did. His father died suddenly in 1925, and with him went the money for college; O'Hara never enrolled anywhere, a wound he carried and joked about for the rest of his life. He drifted through a string of jobs, laborer, ship steward, railroad worker, before settling into newspaper reporting, first in Pottsville and then in New York, where he wrote for several papers and was fired from most of them for drinking and insubordination. He began selling short stories to The New Yorker in the late 1920s and would eventually publish more than four hundred of them there, becoming one of the writers who defined the magazine's clipped, exact house style. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra, appeared in 1934 to immediate acclaim, and he followed it quickly with BUtterfield 8 the next year. Over four decades he published more than a dozen novels, among them Pal Joey, which became a Broadway musical, and Ten North Frederick, which won the National Book Award in 1956, along with hundreds of short stories that returned again and again to the fictional Pennsylvania town of Gibbsville, built from the Pottsville he never stopped writing about. He was proud, easily wounded, and famous among friends for a temper that flared over slights real and imagined, especially anything touching the Yale education he never had. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 11, 1970, at the age of sixty-five.