Selected Stories

This is fiction, but it has, for me, the clang of truth

John Updike

Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well

John O’Hara on John O’Hara, inscribed on his gravestone

A man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvellously well

Ernest Hemingway

A social realist obsessed with the peccadilloes of the upper class, but he was considered a daring writer in the Thirties and Forties, his best prose distinguished by its concision, clever dialect and sexual candor. He is credited with inventing the New Yorker short story

Washington Post

A writer of dream-sharp tales, crisp yet dense

Los Angeles Times

John O'Hara's fiction is preeminent for its social verisimilitude

Lionel Trilling

'The range of O'Hara's knowledge of how Americans live was incomparably greater than that of any other fiction writer of his time'

New Yorker