Jun 24, 2014 | 464 Pages
Jul 03, 2014 | 1067 Minutes
Winner of the National Book Award
“If ever an author was ripe for a critical rebranding, it’s John O’Hara. . . . And Ten North Frederick in particular seems deserving of a fresh readership. . . . In the wake of the 2008 crash and the social volatility it engendered . . . the great American fairytale of class mobility is poised to become, once again, the next frontier in American literature. In that respect, as in many others, John O’Hara, whose work and whose persona could not appear more old-fashioned on their surfaces, turns out to have been miles ahead of us.” —Jonathan Dee, from the Introduction
“I have several friends who have been urging me to read John O’Hara for years. . . . This is the first John O’Hara novel I have read, and I can’t wait to read more. . . . Ten North Frederick is, without a doubt, a brilliant book. . . . You can’t put it down. . . . As I write this, I have just finished reading all 77 of the National Book Award fiction winners. Now I’m going to read more John O’Hara.” —Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation
“O’Hara remains one of America’s greatest social novelists of the twentieth century . . . He captured one of the most far-reaching social transformations in American history. . . . To read [his Pennsylvania] novels is to enter an entire world. They work on the reader with an unspectacular but cumulative power.” —The Atlantic
“[O’Hara] was as acute a social observer as Fitzgerald, as spare a stylist as Hemingway, and in his creation of Gibbsville, in western Pennsylvania, he invented a kind of small-bore variation on Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.” —Los Angeles Times
“Politics, sex and social intercourse—the finest, most discerning and compassionate novel he has written—one of the most distinguished works of modern fiction.” —The New York Post
“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
“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
