John O'Hara: Stories (LOA #282)

Library of America and editor Charles McGrath present a fresh selection of the compulsively readable stories of 20th-century American literature's greatest social observerWriting with equal insight about New York City, Hollywood, andthe small-town Pennsylvania world where he grew up, JohnO'Hara cultivated an unsentimental and often unsparing realism,aiming, he said, "to record the way people talked and thoughtand felt . . . with complete honesty." Praised by contemporariesincluding Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, he wroteabout sex, drinking, and social class with a frankness ahead of itstime. The fiction he published in The New Yorker (more than anyother writer to this day) came to epitomize the kind of shortstory featured in that magazine, and his impeccable ear andskillful dialogue have influenced later writers such as RaymondCarver. Bringing together sixty stories written over fourdecades-the largest, most comprehensive collection of O'Hara'sstories ever published-former New York Times Book Revieweditor Charles McGrath presents a fresh and arresting newperspective on one of American literature's master storytellers.LIBRARY OF AMERICAis 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.

Charles McGrath, editor, is a writer at large at TheNew York Times, and was formerly editor of TheNew York Times Book Review and deputy editor ofThe New Yorker.

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