John O'Hara

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...