I see John O'Hara as somewhat similar to Paul Bowles since both were ovbiously talented writers with an acute eye and a certain personal style (Bowles moreso), but who are both vastly underappreciated--and rather obscure--these days.

Certainly you can find their books in general bookstores and there are probably cults of devoted fans places, but their influence is largely discreet and specialized and you ask the general literary public who they are and you would have a negative reply.

An interesting point mentioned is that O'Hara had a large amount of works published in The New Yorker--when it wasn't the padded go-to "intellectual" magazine today--and yet he is unfamiliar to most. A comparable example of a well-known literary in his day is the similarly acerbic Alexander Woolcott who nowadays is even lesser known than O'Hara; but then Woolcott was primarily a critic and it seems the only critics that reverberate in contemporary people's minds are Oscar Wilde, and to a lesser extent the theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan--maybe it was just because Tynan said Fuck a lot?

Then there's Pauline Kael although she's more an ideal for underachieving self-crowned movie "critics" armed with a blog and potato chips.

Last edited by Incroyable (2007-03-22 01:48:49)

O'hara makes many detailed references to the clothes men wear in his fiction. Be that as it may, I find his longer novels tedious-much prefer the short stories.

I think his Gibbsville stories are the best.  They adapted some of them years ago, with John Savage and Gig Young--I seem to remeber the adaptation being pretty good.

Last edited by Patrick Bateman (2007-03-22 22:02:22)

I also like Flannery O'Connor and I'd also add Shirley Jackson to the list of positives.

And of course, Dorothy Parker.

Last edited by Incroyable (2007-03-23 00:07:30)