John O’Hara – The Best Short Story Writer You’ve Never Read

I had thought first about titling this post “John O’Hara – The Best Short Story Writer You’ve Never Heard Of,” but realized that that would be inaccurate.  I think that most fiction readers have at least heard of the man.  Some have even read his novels; his novels are included in college literature classes sometimes, but curiously, not his short stories.  O’Hara was a good novelist, and his novels made him a lot of money, not just in sales but from the movie adaptations they inspired: BUtterfield 8, From The Terrace, Ten North Frederick, Pal Joey.

Short story writing is where he excelled. In his lifetime, he had 247 stories published by The New Yorker, still a record for the magazine considered the gold standard of short fiction. In his short pieces, his writing does so much with so little that it astounds.  A master, he never resorted to anything “writerly,” but simply told the story; better yet, he let his characters tell their stories.  He writes the best dialog you will ever read.  I repeat: he writes the best dialog you will ever read.

Sadly, O’Hara is ignored today.  He is conspicuously absent from modern anthologies, and literature classes.  He is never mentioned along with his contemporaries.

I believe that these exclusions are due to the man’s personality.  Apparently, O’Hara was difficult.  Cantankerous.  An Irish Catholic, forever excluded from grand society, he exhibited the type of self-loathing that fuels social climbing.  He sat opposite most of the literary world politically.  And, he was a nasty, pugnacious drunk. 

So what?  His work is more important than all that.  Hemingway was an asshole, too.

There are a bunch of collections of O’Hara’s short work.  I don’t think you can go wrong with any of them.  One of my personal favorites, and a great place to start, is The Cape Cod Lighter.

John O’Hara may have been an unpleasant man to know, but he died in 1970.  His stories are still around, and that’s all that should matter to anyone.