More John O'Hara, please
“John O’Hara’s Pittsburgh Summer”
The photo of the William Penn Hotel and headline above accompanied my essay published in yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post Gazette print edition.
I’ve written about the late, great John O’Hara here recently He is one of my favorite writers of both short stories and novels.
O’Hara (1905-1970) led a life that has been chronicled in three outstanding biographies: Frank McShane’s The Life of John O’Hara, Matthew Bruccoli’s The O’Hara Concern, and my favorite: Geoffrey Wolff’s The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara.
Wolff’s title, “The Art of Burning Bridges,” is spot on. One bridge that O’Hara burned was as a twenty-seven-year-old struggling writer living in Pittsburgh the Summer of 1933. He moved from New York to take a job as managing editor of a local weekly magazine. His tenure was short-lived.
The summer gave birth to several legends: that his public behavior insulted some of the most renowned names in city society, that a scandal was barely averted when he became involved with a recently married woman, and that he began the novel Appointment in Samarra on his typewriter in his William Penn Hotel room.
As I wrote in the essay, the wild summer was simply a microcosm of his entire life, and when he moved back to New York “chaos followed him like a shadow.”
You can find the essay, John O'Hara's Pittsburgh Summer in the Post Gazette here.
Yes, John O’Hara was a bridge-burner, but he was one of the important writers of the twentieth century, and American literature is the better for his contributions.