1934 edition; Random House publishers, New York; Book Club Edition; hardbound in tan boards with green lettering along spine; very good condition with unmarked pages; dust jacket good with some minor wear - see pics.
Description -
Appointment in Samarra, goodreads review -
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country club membership, and a wife who loves him. His decline and fall, over the course of just 72 hours around Christmas, is a matter of too much spending, too much liquor, and a couple of reckless gestures. That his calamity is petty and preventable only makes it more powerful. In Faulkner, the tragedies all seem to be taking place on Olympus, even when they’re happening among the low-lifes. In O’Hara, they could be happening to you.
Butterfield 8 goodreads review -
A bestseller upon its publication, BUtterfield 8 was inspired by a news account of the discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman washed up on a Long Island beach. Was it an accident, a murder, a suicide? The circumstances of her death were never resolved, but O’Hara seized upon the tragedy to imagine the woman’s down-and-out life in New York City in the early 1930s.
“O’Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character,” Fran Lebowitz writes in her Introduction. With brash honesty and a flair for the unconventional, BUtterfield 8 lays bare the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. The result is a masterpiece of American fiction.
Hope of Heaven goodreads review -
A charming little doomed romance from the 1930's, John O'hara's prime. A world weary screen-writer of only limited success in his mid-thirties is in love with an idealistic young woman in her twenties who is only passingly interested in him. When her long estranged father comes to LA on business, tragedy ensues. Unrelentingly negative - a gem.