The Doctor's Son by John O'Hara

Author:John O'Hara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2020-06-04T23:05:18+00:00

EDITOR’S NOTE

CHRONOLOGY

NOTE ON THE TEXT

NOTES

Editor’s Note

John O’Hara never tired of complaining about how underestimated he was, and he had a point, even if he made it far too often. He was a gifted and sensitive writer, with talents quite different from those of his more highly regarded contemporaries: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. His strength and his limitation was that he was stubbornly earthbound. There are no similes in his work, no flights of lyricism or fancy writing, no hints of a deeper meaning beyond the moment. Nothing in O’Hara is “like” anything else. Things are vibrant and valuable for their own sake, and he described them—the make of a car, the cut of a suit, the song on the radio, the brand of cigarette, the sound of a broken tire chain on a snowy morning—with a scrupulousness that bordered on devotion.

O’Hara was also a remarkably prolific writer. He published fourteen novels in his lifetime, and hundreds of short stories, almost too many to count. The sixty stories in this volume amount to just a small fraction. In deciding what to reprint here, I worried less about choosing stories that were representative of O’Hara’s vast and varied body of work than about singling out the ones that seemed to me the best, least dated, most accessible—stories that demonstrate why O’Hara is still worth reading. Without my quite intending it, though, the final selection also offers a pretty fair picture of O’Hara’s range and variety. There are stories that run barely a page or so and stories that are novella-length; stories from the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties; stories set in New York, in Hollywood, and in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, O’Hara’s fictional version of Pottsville, the town where he grew up and which in many ways he never really left. Missing here are some early, sketchlike pieces O’Hara wrote for The New Yorker, and the ones he wrote about the nightclub emcee Pal Joey, which eventually became the source for the Broadway musical. (Those will be included in a future Library of America volume.)

Pottsville, when O’Hara was born, in 1905, was the prosperous commercial center of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. His father was a successful and respected physician there, and the family belonged to the country-club, horse-riding gentry. Yet because he was Irish and Catholic, O’Hara felt himself to be an outsider, and all his life, even after he had become wealthy and famous, he retained an outsider’s neediness and sullen defensiveness. His face was pressed against a glass that sometimes wasn’t there. But the way outsiders do, he also became an uncanny observer of the world around him, someone who noticed everything. His father’s early death, in 1925—together with Dr. O’Hara’s history, it turned out, of living far beyond his means—ended O’Hara’s dream of going to Yale, which would have been for him, he fantasized, what Princeton was for Fitzgerald. Instead, he got a more practical and—for his kind of writer—more useful education knocking around, spending marathon hours in speakeasies and working at a series of small-town newspaper jobs.

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