Collected Stories of John O'Hara: Selected and With an Introduction by Frank MacShane

A stunning and unassuming collection. In a few seemingly slapdash phrases, O'Hara manages to give insightful histories to his characters. It took me a few stories to appreciate O'Hara's sensibilities and the characters he chooses to focus on. They're deeply deeply flawed, every action belying a wealth of history. And we're only allowed to see them through these (mostly) five-paged stories in a claustrophobic yet transient setting (on a train trip / in a restaurant / in a hotel / on the same bus trip everyday). Despite the constraints of his settings, their variety amazes me, especially in their brevity. They capture the eroding upstanding righteousness of early 20th century America in sharp focussed snapshots. I wouldn't say I love show more these stories but I highly respect and appreciate them, both in terms of O'Hara's craft and dedication to chronicling this particular milieu.

Favourite story so far: Imagine Kissing Pete, which at almost fifty pages is actually one of the longer of O'Hara's short stories.

Most surprising story because of the context: The Doctor's Son, a story set in a small mining town during the 1918 flu epidemic.

Further reading: I really enjoyed this article on O'Hara's stories. show less

Realism from the 1920's through the 1960's, these stories were of cheating spouses, loneliness, Hollywood, alcoholism, the dawn of the age of motorized transportation and murder. O'Hara told of people's lives in early modern America giving glimpses of language, and sex, and the hardness of people and what they could bear.
Took a few years to read. The stories were read between novels and other reading.

too old