Recommendations
Books Like Appointment in Samarra
Best books to read after Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra is the definitive portrait of social self-destruction in American fiction — Julian English, three days, Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. These recommendations share its portrait of class anxiety, its unflinching social realism, or its anatomy of a man unable to stop himself from catastrophe.
- 1Buy
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The predecessor — Jay Gatsby's pursuit of a class that destroys him, the same portrait of American social codes as annihilating forces, the novel O'Hara was most directly responding to.
- 2Buy
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
The closest contemporary heir — Frank and April Wheeler destroying themselves in suburban Connecticut, the same inexorable social trap, a darker and more domestic catastrophe.
- 3Buy
BUtterfield 8
by John O'Hara
O'Hara's follow-up — Gloria Wandrous in 1930s New York, a woman defined by her reputation, equally precise social observation in a compressed form.
- 4Buy
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart's destruction by New York society — the founding American social-class novel, the trap that Julian English inhabits in masculine form.
- 5Buy
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
The Pulitzer-winning novel of ordinary life and its catastrophic pressure — Clarissa Vaughan, a Virginia Woolf narrative, the same quality of inevitability as Appointment in Samarra.
- 6Buy
Tender is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's other great portrait of social disintegration — Dick Diver's collapse across a decade of expatriate life, more ambitious and more despairing than Gatsby.
- 7Buy
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The contemporary American social novel most comparable in its attention to class and family — the Lambert family, the Midwest, failure and pretense, a wider canvas than Appointment in Samarra.
- 8Buy
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Roth's Pulitzer-winning portrait of the American Dream destroyed — the Swede's successful life as a trap, the same anatomy of class performance and catastrophe.
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