John O'Hara

It begins with a drink thrown in a moment of anger—public, irreversible, and instantly understood. From that point on, everything closes in. Business relationships sour, social standing slips, money tightens, and the small evasions that once held life together stop working. What follows unfolds over just a few days, with a precision that makes every misstep feel both accidental and...

For all its excellence as a social panorama and a sketch of a marriage, it is as a picture of a man destroyed by drink and pride that Appointment in Samarra lives frighteningly in the mind – John Updike Julian English prides himself a member of his hometown's social elite, but from the moment he throws a cocktail in the...

O'Hara 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. — The New York Times When the beautiful, imperious and moneyed Grace Caldwell Tate wants something, she goes after it, men included. Her affair scandalises Pennsylvania's elite, and she must face...