A Rage to Live

A man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvellously well – Ernest Hemingway
O’Hara occupies a unique position…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 * New York Times *
O’Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character – Fran Lebowitz
A fascinating character study by one of America’s most underrated storytellers, but there are other rewards as well. O’Hara’s dialogue is unerringly authentic and his narrative passages as graphic as a photograph * Los Angeles Times *
His ear for dialogue is legendary, and he evoked New York cabbies, Hollywood producers and cheap hoods like Pal Joey as easily as he did Park Avenue socialites… Few authors today write convincingly of matters involving public life and private morality - they tend to do one or the other. But O’Hara could intertwine them in a five-page sketch or an 800-page epic. * Washington Post *

John O’Hara was born in Pennsylvania on 31 January 1905. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), won him instant acclaim, and he quickly came to be regarded as one of the most prominent writers in America. He won the National Book Award for his novel Ten North Frederick and had more stories published in the New Yorker than anyone in the history of the magazine. His fourteen novels include A Rage to Live, Pal Joey, BUtterfield 8 and From the Terrace. John O’Hara died on 11 April 1970.

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