Library of America John O’Hara Edition

In one volume, four novels by “the real Fitzgerald”: scintillating, sexually frank tales of the desperate pursuit of pleasure and status in Jazz Age America.

Here in one volume are four gripping novels about the anxious pursuit of pleasure and status in the Jazz Age by the writer who has been called “the real Fitzgerald.” In the brilliant debut Appointment in Samarra (1934), the life of car dealer Julian English unravels with stunning swiftness after he throws a highball in another man’s face. Butterfield 8 (1935), based on the notorious case of the drowned socialite Starr Faithfull, is the still-shocking story of one young woman’s defiant recklessness amid the desperate revels of Prohibition-era Manhattan. The long out-of-print Hope of Heaven (1938) shifts the scene to Los Angeles for a noirish tale of ill-fated love. And Pal Joey (1940), inspiration for the enduring Rodgers & Hart musical, presents O’Hara’s perhaps most memorable character, a sleazy nightclub emcee whose wised-up talk highlights O’Hara’s matchless ear for the American language. 

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Writing with equal insight about New York City, Hollywood, and the small-town Pennsylvania world where he grew up, John O’Hara cultivated an unsentimental and often unsparing realism, aiming, he said, “to record the way people talked and thought and felt . . . with complete honesty.” Praised by contemporaries including Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, he wrote about sex, drinking, and social class with a frankness ahead of its time. The fiction he published in The New Yorker (more than any other writer to this day) came to epitomize the kind of short story featured in that magazine, and his impeccable ear and skillful dialogue have influenced later writers such as Raymond Carver. Bringing together sixty stories written over four decades—the largest, most comprehensive collection of O’Hara’s stories ever published—former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath presents a fresh and arresting new perspective on one of American literature’s master storytellers.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.