Before I get started with the latest post, I wanted to offer a small shout-out to the women of the Herstory Club! This internet collective is made up entirely of women of all ages who focus on the study of history, and I was recently welcomed into the ranks. I'm very excited to be in the club and appreciate the kind greetings I've received, so thank you!
November is here and I hope you are all well! At this time last year I was battling what turned out to be pneumonia, but so far I've been much luckier this autumn. The weather hasn't been the most conducive to going out to collect markers, but I've still got some stockpiled from before the lockdown, so we're going to take a trip back to Schuylkill County today to look at one of Pennsylvania's native authors.
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| The marker is located in front of O'Hara's childhood home at 606 Mahantongo Street |
John O'Hara was born in Pottsville on January 31, 1905, the eldest of eight children born to Patrick and Katharine (Delaney) O'Hara. Where the family lived initially I don't know, but when John was eleven years old, the family moved into a three-story house on Pottsville's Mahantongo Street, not far from the Burd Patterson mansion. The house, known today as the John O'Hara House, was originally built by the Yuengling family, and the O'Haras lived there until 1928.
His Irish Catholic family was relatively affluent, his father being a doctor. This enabled him to attend the prestigious Niagara Prep school in Lewiston, New York, as a young man. He had dreams of attending Yale, but his father's death in 1925 put an end to that dream, as the family was left struggling financially after the loss. Instead of heading for Yale as he wanted, O'Hara had to look for work to support his mother and younger siblings Mary, Martin, James, Eugene, Kathleen, Joseph, and Thomas. Having grown up with the best of what life could offer - membership in country clubs, domestic servants, things like that - and then having it taken away almost overnight left a permanent mark on John, and would impact much of his life's work.
O'Hara could write well; his class at Niagara Prep had elected him Class Poet in 1924. So to help his family, he did what made the most sense - he got a job with the local newspaper, the Pottsville News. Later in life he also wrote for New York papers Mirror, Telegraph, and Herald Tribune, as well as Time magazine. The New Yorker published many if not most of his short stories. During World War II he served as a war correspondent in the Pacific theater.
What he is best remembered for producing, however, are his books. His first novel was published in 1934; Appointment in Samarra was well received and even garnered a ringing endorsement from Ernest Hemingway, who called the author "a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well". His second novel, Butterfield 8, soon followed and was later turned into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, who won an Oscar for her performance. Another novel, Pal Joey, was originally published serially in the New Yorker; this became a musical on Broadway starring Gene Kelly in 1940, and later became a film starring Frank Sinatra. Paul Newman starred in another film based on one of his novels, From the Terrace, which in O'Hara's own opinion was "the best thing I've ever done." By the time of his death, he had written several novels and over 400 short stories.
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| Pottsville's John O'Hara House |
I imagine that's an exaggeration, of course, but various sources indicate that O'Hara did have a reputation for being sometimes unpleasant. When he drank, he was known for picking fights, and though he stopped drinking during the last twenty years of his life, he still had a temper. He was offered (and, for some reason, declined) three honorary degrees from other schools, but he was never able to successfully petition his dream school of Yale to give him one, which rankled him sorely. According to Lorin Stein, who wrote about him several years after his death, he would swipe matchbooks from social clubs which didn't accept him as a member, and "he demanded from his publishers not just high advances but also gifts and lunches at the Ritz. He was addicted to the tokens of success." He was a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 (and he wrote to his daughter that he wanted it "so bad I can taste it"), but it went to John Steinbeck instead. To his credit, however, O'Hara had a sense of humor about the loss - he sent Steinbeck a telegram stating, "Congratulations, I can think of only one other author I'd rather see get it." In fact, his only major literary award was the National Book Award, which was given to his novel Ten North Frederick in 1956.
John O'Hara's works frequently include a location called Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a small anthracite mining community which is of course a barely-concealed representation of Pottsville. (He named it for Wolcott Gibbs, who was a friend and frequently his editor at The New Yorker.) Like I said earlier, growing up wealthy and then having the wealth stripped from his family so suddenly left its mark on his personality; another thing which affected him his whole life was growing up Catholic in a largely Protestant society. He always felt like an outsider, and his class insecurity was a recurring theme in his writing. Yale also appears often, as many of his characters attended Yale since he could not.
In his personal life, O'Hara was married three times. His first marriage, to Helen Ritchie, ended in divorce after just two years; a few years later, in 1937, he married Belle Wylie. Their daughter, Wylie Delaney O'Hara, is the author's only child. He remained married to Belle until her death in 1954, and a year later remarried Katherine Barnes Bryan, to whom he was married until his own death. He had a fatal heart attack in his sleep and passed away on April 11, 1970; at that time he was living in Princeton, New Jersey, and is buried there in Princeton Cemetery. He had recently completed one last novel, The Ewing, which was published posthumously in 1971, and was working on a sequel that would never be finished.
John O'Hara was a complex individual, from everything I've read, and I get the distinct impression that you either loved this guy or you hated him. But in his own words, in response to some callous reviews, "It is traditional that if you are a great artist, no one gives a damn about you while you're still alive." So I leave it to his readers to decide how they feel about him now, fifty years after he's gone.
Sources and Further Reading:
Stein, Lorin. "He Told the Truth About His Time." The New Yorker, August 19, 2013.
John O'Hara at the Library of America
John O'Hara's obituary in the Camden, New Jersey Courier Post, April 13, 1970. Courtesy of Newspapers.com.
John O'Hara at FindAGrave.com
City of Pottsville official website
The Schuylkill County Historical Society
John O'Hara at the Historical Marker Database
City of Pottsville official website
The Schuylkill County Historical Society
John O'Hara at the Historical Marker Database
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
I consider O'Hara the best American short fiction writer of the mid part of the 20th Century, and his Gibbsville stories, which have been collected, his best. He was known as the “master of the fancied slight." In the seventies NBC had a short lived series based on his stories, called Gibbsville, with John Savage as young Jim Malloy, O'Hara alter ego, and Gig Young as an alcoholic reporter. Actual stories were used in the scripts, and it was a well acted, literate series. It was cancelled. One problem with it was that on the show Pottsville, I mean Gibbsville, was flat. Hah! Oh, and O'Hara wrote for The Journal, whose office was on Center Street, down the block and across from his statue. O'Hara also has John O'Hara Blvd. named after him. It used to be the old whorehouse district below the Court House back in the day. As a kid in Pottsville his books were not "acceptable." They were called "dirty." Another problem was that they told the truth about the underbelly of respectable society in town. I knew people who knew who Julian English, the protagonist of Appointment, was. Ten North Frederick is on the east side of town on George Street. Oh, and Appointment is the best of his novels, and the only one worth reading. Dorothy Parker suggested the title, taken from a play by Maugham, and the story which contains the title can be heard performed by Boris Karloff in the film Targets. Etc., etc..
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