John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra

About Appointment in Samarra

John O'Hara (1905–1970) was one of the most prolific and widely read American writers of the mid-twentieth century — the author of thirty novels and short story collections, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and a writer whom Hemingway named among the four great American novelists of his generation. Appointment in Samarra (1934), his debut novel, is his masterpiece: a three-day portrait of Julian English in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania (modeled on O'Hara's native Pottsville), who destroys himself by a series of increasingly irreversible social missteps beginning with throwing a drink in the face of Harry Reilly at a Christmas party. The novel is the definitive portrait of WASP upper-middle-class social codes and the catastrophic cost of violating them, and it is the most Fitzgerald-influenced of the great American social novels. O'Hara subsequently won the National Book Award for Ten North Frederick (1955) and was repeatedly passed over for the Pulitzer; his reputation declined after his death, and Appointment in Samarra is the novel through which he is most likely to be rediscovered.