1. John O'Hara was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style.
16 Facts About John O'Hara
1. 2.
John O'Hara became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8.
3.
John O'Hara achieved substantial commercial success in the years after World War II, when his fiction repeatedly appeared in Publishers Weekly's annual list of the top ten best-selling fiction works in the United States.
4.
John O'Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, to an affluent Irish American family.
5.
John O'Hara attended the secondary school Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New York, where he was named Class Poet for Class of 1924.
6.
John O'Hara's father died about that time, leaving him unable to afford Yale, the college of his dreams, and he fell overnight from the privileged life of a well-heeled doctor's family, including club memberships, riding and dance lessons, fancy cars in the barn, and domestic servants in the house.
7.
In 1934, John O'Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra.
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Wolcott Gibbs 8.
Over four decades, John O'Hara published novels, novellas, plays, screenplays and more than 400 short stories, the majority of them in The New Yorker.
9.
Many of John O'Hara's stories are set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a barely fictionalized version of his home town of Pottsville, a small city in the anthracite region of the northeastern United States.
10.
John O'Hara named Gibbsville for his friend and frequent editor at The New Yorker Wolcott Gibbs.
11.
John O'Hara contributed more of them to The New Yorker than any other writer.
12.
John O'Hara complained that his numerous short stories took his time away from writing novels.
13.
In 1949, John O'Hara left The New Yorker bitterly, after it published a withering review of John O'Hara's long novel A Rage to Live by his colleague Brendan Gill.
14.
John O'Hara died from cardiovascular disease in Princeton, New Jersey, and is interred in the Princeton Cemetery.
15.
Also in 1960, John O'Hara's best-selling 1935 novel BUtterfield 8 was released as a film with the same name.
16.
John O'Hara complains that the colleges write him "highly complimentary" letters asking him to perform "chores" such as officiating as writer-in-residence, judging literary contests, and give lectures, yet do not give him degree citations.