Reading Order
Appointment in SamarraJohn O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra Reading Order
John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra (1934) is his masterpiece and one of the most perfectly realized novels of social disintegration in American fiction — a three-day portrait of Julian English, a prosperous Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, car dealer who, at the Christmas party that opens the novel, throws a drink in the face of Harry Reilly, a self-made Irish Catholic to whom he owes $20,000. The gesture is inexplicable even to Julian and begins a cascade of bad decisions — affairs, insults, missed meetings — that ends with his suicide seventy-two hours later. O'Hara's Gibbsville is modeled closely on his native Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and his subject is the social codes of the WASP upper-middle class and the catastrophic consequences of violating them. The novel is one of the most Fitzgerald-influenced in American fiction — published a decade after The Great Gatsby, it applies Fitzgerald's method of social diagnosis to a protagonist who is not an outsider trying to enter the class but an insider destroying himself from within. Ernest Hemingway named it one of the four great American novels.
Where to start
Appointment in Samarra
Complete Appointment in Samarra Book List
- 1Buy
Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara·1934·Start here — Julian English, three days in Gibbsville, the most perfect portrait of self-destruction in American social fiction. - 2Buy
BUtterfield 8
John O'Hara·1935·Gloria Wandrous in New York, a single day, a woman defined by her reputation — the follow-up and almost as good. - 3Buy
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald·1925·The predecessor O'Hara was responding to — Jay Gatsby, class anxiety, the American Dream's cost. - 4Buy
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates·1961·The closest heir — Frank and April Wheeler destroying themselves in suburban Connecticut, social performance and self-destruction in the same vein. - 5Buy
Ten North Frederick
John O'Hara·1955·O'Hara's National Book Award winner — Joe Chapin, Gibbsville politics, a broader canvas than Appointment in Samarra.
Appointment in Samarra — Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Julian throw the drink at the beginning of Appointment in Samarra?
O'Hara never fully explains it, and that inexplicability is central to the novel's meaning. Julian owes Harry Reilly money; Reilly is socially inferior to Julian; throwing the drink is both an assertion of class dominance and a self-destructive act Julian can't account for. O'Hara's point is that social codes can produce behavior that the person performing it cannot explain — that Julian's social formation has made him incapable of the ordinary diplomacy that would save him.
Is Appointment in Samarra too dated to read today?
Its social world — the WASP upper-middle class of 1930s Pennsylvania, the obsessive attention to club memberships and social slights — is obviously dated in its specifics. But the novel's portrait of a man who can't stop himself from destroying his own life is permanently recognizable. The social particularity gives the catastrophe its texture; the catastrophe itself is universal. Most readers find the period detail interesting rather than alienating.
Why is John O'Hara not more famous today?
O'Hara published thirty novels and short story collections and was one of the most widely read serious writers of the mid-twentieth century; Edmund Wilson and Hemingway both admired him. His later reputation suffered partly because of his own difficult personality (he cultivated enemies assiduously), partly because his social world seemed parochial as the century went on, and partly because the literary culture that awarded the prizes (the Pulitzer, the NBA) consistently overlooked him — he never won a Pulitzer despite being nominated multiple times. Appointment in Samarra is his indisputable masterpiece and the novel that has best survived the neglect.
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