BUtterfield 8

“A man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well.” —Ernest Hemingway

“Like Henry James, O’Hara could create a world where class and social structures are all-important but not openly discussed.” —The Village Voice

“O’Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character….  [His] genius was in his unerring precision in capturing the speech and the milieus of his characters, whether the setting was Pennsylvania, Hollywood, or New York.” —Fran Lebowitz

“O’Hara occupies a unique position in our contemporary literature… He is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust.” —Lionel Trilling, The New York Times

“An author I love is John O’Hara. . . . I think he’s been forgotten by time, but for dialogue lovers, he’s a goldmine of inspiration.” —Douglas Coupland, Shelf Awareness

“One of the great novels of New York in the Depression . . . [O’Hara’s] novels of the mid-thirties are his classics, and they deserve to be much more famous than they are.” —Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, from the Introduction