John O'Hara – författare

'For all its excellence as a social panorama and a sketch of a marriage, it is as a picture of a man destroyed by drink and pride that Appointment in Samarra lives frighteningly in the mind' John UpdikeJulian English prides himself a member of his hometown’s social elite, but from the moment he throws a cocktail in the face of a powerful business associate his life spirals out of control, taking his loving but troubled marriage with it. Following English’s rapid decline and fall, Appointment in Samarra is a fast-paced and blackly comic portrait of 1930s America. O’Hara’s debut novel introduced a prolific new voice to a generation and still stands as one of the great works of American fiction.

‘More than any other American novelist, O'Hara has both reflected his times and captured the unique individual for generations to come’ LA Times'On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who was later to be the cause of a sensation in New York awoke much too early for her night before'This particular morning Gloria finds herself alone in a stranger's apartment with nothing but a torn evening dress and her stockings and underwear. When she takes a fur coat from the wardrobe to wear home, she sets in train a series of events that will lead to tragedy. A bestseller on its first publication, BUtterfield 8 is the glittering story of a 1930s glamour girl whose ill-starred entanglement with a respectable married man is set against a backdrop of Manhattan bars and bedrooms.

'O'Hara is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust' The New York TimesWhen the beautiful, imperious and moneyed Grace Caldwell Tate wants something she goes after it, men included. Her affair scandalises Pennsylvania's elite and she must face the costs to her marriage and the man she really loves.A bestseller on publication in 1949, A Rage to Live is a candid tale of idealists and libertines, tradesmen and crusaders, men of violence and goodwill, and women of fierce strength and tenderness.

One of Time’s All-Time 100 Best NovelsThe writer whom Fran Lebowitz called “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald” makes his Penguin Classics debut with this beautiful deluxe edition of his best-loved book. One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is John O’Hara’s crowning achievement. In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, social circuit is electrified with parties and dances. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction. Brimming with wealth and privilege, jealousy and infidelity, O’Hara’s iconic first novel is an unflinching look at the dark side of the American dream—and a lasting testament to the keen social intelligence if a major American writer.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

‘Superb... These thirty-two stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons... O'Hara was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of mid-century society’ Wall Street JournalJohn O'Hara remains the great chronicler of American society, and nowhere are his powers more evident than in his portraits of New York's so-called Golden Age. Unsparingly observed, brilliantly cutting and always on the tragic edge of epiphany, the stories collected here are among O’Hara’s finest work, and show why he still stands as the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker.

'This is fiction, but it has, for me, the clang of truth' John UpdikeWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY E. L. DOCTOROWJohn O’Hara is widely credited with inventing the New Yorker short story, and remains the most-published short story writer in the history of the magazine. Selected from his vast collection of short fiction written over forty years, these refreshingly frank, sparely written stories show him at his best. Exposing a world of bartenders and 'b-girls', car washers and criminals, O'Hara dissects the subtleties that bind humans together and the pressures that separate them.