Selected Stories by John O’Hara – 303 pages

Which renowned writers will remain read after they are gone, and which of these writers will fall by the wayside?

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John O’Hara published around 247 stories in The New Yorker from 1928 to 1967. This is still a record for the magazine. O’Hara’s stories definitely captured their era and were modern and up-to-date back then, but how do they hold up as lasting literature?

To find out what life in the United States was really like in the 1930s and the 1940s and the 1950s, the stories of John O’Hara are as good a place as any to go. His stories go way back in the Prohibition era and continue up to the Kennedy era. O’Hara was especially strong on dialogue. He captured the way people talked back then with a great amount of accuracy.

Here is an example of O’Hara’s dialogue from the story “The Moccasins”:

He walked with them to the car. “Tracy, I would like to say one thing to your sister.”

“My guess is you’ve said too much already. I probably ought to punch you in the nose, if I knew what this was all about.”

“You don’t, and anyway don’t try it,” said Doc. He spoke to Mary. “Just remember one thing. You don’t have to walk through moccasins for it.”

“What’s he talking about?” said Jack?

“Who cares?” said Mary.

In the story “The Doctor’s Son’, there is a diphtheria epidemic. The doctor goes to the various bars – Irish, Hungarian, and Polish – to treat sick patients who all come to the bar to see the doctor. Diphtheria must have been a severe communicable illness that people died from, but that wouldn’t stop the bar owner from passing a bottle around to both the sick patients and the well people at the bar to drink from. We also get the derogatory names they used for other groups of people besides themselves.

There are the mild jokes of the time:

“You know that joke: we can’t afford a Ford.”

Most of these stories are ten or less pages long. That is one of the qualities I like about these stories. O’Hara just presents the scenes as are without a lot of preliminary explanation or ending summary. We go quickly in and out of these people’s situations without a lot of messing around.

John O’Hara captured American life at the time. He wrote with a great deal of verisimilitude about the way people talked and acted in his era. Is that enough? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Grade:    B+