Biography

John Henry O’Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, on January 31, 1905, the son of Patrick Henry O’Hara, a well-known doctor, and Katherine Elizabeth Delaney O’Hara. He was the eldest of eight children in a Catholic family. O’Hara attended Fordham Preparatory School and the Keystone State Normal School, and he graduated from Niagara Preparatory School in 1924, after which he worked at odd jobs—a great variety of them—before finally settling into journalism. He had passed the required examinations to enroll at Yale University, but his father’s death precluded his attending college.

O’Hara worked as a reporter for two newspapers in Pennsylvania, then for three in New York. His journalistic experience was as varied as his previous work had been: He covered sports, news, politics, and religion. He served as film critic on the Morning Telegraph, football editor at The New Yorker, and editor-in-chief of the Pittsburgh Bulletin-Index. He was employed by Time magazine and would eventually write columns for the Trenton Times-Advertiser, Collier’s, Newsweek, and Holiday. Some sources list Franey Delaney as an O’Hara pseudonym because he once wrote a radio column under that name. After the publication of his first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), he became a writer for motion pictures, working in turn for four of the largest studios in Hollywood.

Appointment in Samarra was such an extraordinarily successful first novel that immediately after its publication O’Hara was considered a major American writer. He went on to publish more than two dozen novels, volumes of short stories, plays, essays, and sketches. Of his more than three hundred short stories, many first appeared in The New Yorker.

Most of O’Hara’s novels were best sellers, and a number were adapted as motion pictures. Among the most popular novels, in terms of both sales and critical reception, were Butterfield 8 (1935), Ten North Frederick (1955), and From the Terrace (1958).

For Ten North Frederick, O’Hara received the National Book Award in 1956. It became a successful film, as did both From the Terrace and Butterfield 8. Major film stars—such as Gary Cooper, Paul Newman, and Elizabeth Taylor—were cast in adaptations of O’Hara novels.

Among O’Hara’s collections of short stories are The Doctor’s Son, and Other Stories, (1935), Pipe Night (1945), Hellbox (1947), Assembly (1961), The Cape Cod Lighter (1962), The Horse Knows the Way (1964), Waiting for Winter (1966), and Good Samaritan, and Other Stories (1974). He also published collections of his essays and newspaper articles. He adapted some of his sketches about nightclubs and their habitués into a successful musical comedy, Pal Joey (1940), later a motion picture starring Frank Sinatra.

O’Hara frequented nightclubs himself, once taking an apartment close to his favorite, “21,” in New York City. In 1964, the American Academy of Arts and Letters presented O’Hara with the Gold Medal Award of Merit. In 1931, O’Hara married Helen Ritchie Petit, from whom he was divorced in 1933. On December 3, 1937, he married to Belle Mulford Wylie, who died in January, 1954. With Belle he had his only child, Wylie Delaney. His third marriage was to Katherine Barnes Bryan on January 31, 1955.

O’Hara was a blond, blunt-featured man, often described as tough and cynical. He was independent and impatient by nature—he was expelled from his first two schools, and he abandoned the Roman Catholicism in which he had been raised. When O’Hara left Pottsville in 1927 to seek work first in Montana, later in Chicago, and still later in New York and Hollywood, his travels and the many jobs he briefly held—steward on a boat, steel mill worker, soda jerk, guard at an amusement park, gas meter reader, press agent for Warner Bros., even actor in one scene of a 1936 film—gave him rich material and a wealth of details for the realistic fiction he would write.

He affected no interest in his reputation with the critics, and he laid no claims to being a great artist. Rather, he characterized himself as an honest and ordinary person who was a professional. He said that he knew what the “ordinary guy” liked and how to write it. Disparaged by some critics during the first half of his career as a writer of merely popular fiction, he was accused during the last half of his career of being old-fashioned and irrelevant. His answer to all criticism, favorable and unfavorable, was more stories. He once told an interviewer that he would like to fill the world up with his books. Although critics have generally argued that he is at his best in the short-story genre, he is probably remembered most for his many best-selling novels.

O’Hara died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 11, 1970.

Analysis

Critical opinion of O’Hara’s work has long been divided. His receipt of the National Book Award in 1956 and the Gold Medal Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964 indicates that the literary establishment considered him an important writer. The academic community, however, has largely ignored him. He is seldom found in the anthologies used on college campuses. One reason for this neglect, and the most obvious one, is that O’Hara’s fiction gives the professor little to discuss in a literature class. O’Hara avoids figurative language and rhetorical richness.

His style was permanently influenced by his newspaper training. He is very traditional in his narrative technique, eschewing all trends toward experimentation with chronology, point of view, or dialogue. Perhaps it is this spareness of style which led the eminent American critic Edmund Wilson to comment that O’Hara’s long works always seemed like first drafts of what might eventually have become nice little novels. (Wilson did, though, praise O’Hara highly as a short-story writer.) Another adverse criticism often leveled against the novels is that they lack a moral center. The argument is that the narrative voice is so detached, so like the ideally objective journalist, that it is unclear how the author feels about his characters.

O’Hara’s fictional world is a very dangerous place; his characters are never secure. Their lives may be blighted at any moment by financial reversals, social missteps, even violent death. As is true in life (but often unsatisfying in fiction), what happens to the characters may have little to do with their behavior. As is also often true in real life, some characters appear to have no good reason for being in the story. They seem to result more from the protagonist’s randomness of experience than from any necessity of the plot.

It has also been observed that O’Hara is America’s foremost out-of-date novelist. As this argument goes, he took little note of the immense changes wrought by World War II and the nuclear age, continuing to write the same kind of stories he had written throughout the 1930’s. In fact, say some critics, O’Hara continued to retell the same story in endless variety right up until his death. A substantial body of opinion holds that Appointment in Samarra is O’Hara’s best novel. As a rule, novelists do not welcome being told that their first novel is their best, because the implication is that they have shown no improvement in all the work that followed. Perhaps this is why O’Hara stated that Appointment in Samarra was his second favorite novel.

On the credit side of the critical ledger, O’Hara has been called one of the finest social commentators in American literature. He has been favorably compared to Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and William Faulkner—authors who take a society, or some segment of a society, and examine it from every possible angle in one work after another.

O’Hara is especially effective in revealing the workings of class in a society that gives lip service to its democratic character. Because Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of a class structure, O’Hara seems to say, they disguise their class consciousness and make snobbery even more cruel.

O’Hara’s ear for dialogue is almost unfailing. He also has the ability to characterize quickly and deftly with a snatch of dialogue or a few well-chosen details. O’Hara is justly famed for his accuracy of observation; his characters do not merely climb into a car, they climb into a particular make and model of car. A man is not merely wearing a blue suit, he is wearing a blue suit of a certain shade, made from a specific material, and cut in a particular style. Someone once made the point in this way: When O’Hara introduced into a story the schedule for trains running between two eastern cities, the contemporary commuter could have relied upon O’Hara’s schedule every bit as much as upon the one issued by the railroad. O’Hara, the old newsman, always did his research and would not allow himself to be caught in a discrepancy or an anachronism.

It has been argued that the myriad details sometimes overwhelm the story, that O’Hara’s fiction is in danger of becoming more artifact than art. It is probably true that his books will serve future generations as valuable social histories of the first half of the twentieth century.

O’Hara revealed that he wrote quickly and revised little. He attributed this tendency to his early work as a rewrite man, when he was constantly getting pieces to rework just before deadline. The English novelist John Braine, who admired O’Hara very much, observes, of Appointment in Samarra particularly, that this rapid writing may account for the brisk pace and the energy of the narrative. He also praises O’Hara for not making judgments in his fiction, asserting that the proper role of the fiction writer is observer, not judge.

Appointment in Samarra was O’Hara’s first published novel. For a 1953 Modern Library edition of the book, O’Hara wrote a foreword recounting how he had composed it. He wrote it over the period from September, 1933, to March, 1934, in a small hotel room in New York City. He worked five nights a week—he had developed a preference for nighttime writing during his early years in newspaper work. After completing the first twenty-five thousand words, O’Hara submitted the manuscript to Harcourt, Brace&Company.

Alfred Harcourt was impressed with what he read and subsequently gave the young author a subsidy of fifty dollars a week until the novel was finished. O’Hara credits Dorothy Parker with giving him, indirectly, the title of the novel. He had been using “The Infernal Grove” as a working title until the day Parker showed him a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s play Sheppy (1933). It contained Maugham’s rendering of the Samarra legend: A servant meets Death, in the form of a woman, in the marketplace at Baghdad. He imagines that she makes a threatening gesture. Terrified, he borrows his master’s horse and flees to Samarra. Death later tells the master that she was startled rather than threatening when she came upon the servant in the marketplace: She was surprised to see him in Baghdad, for she had an appointment to meet him that night in Samarra. O’Hara believed that Appointment in Samarra was the perfect title for the story of his doomed protagonist, Julian English.

Parker disapproved of the title, as did O’Hara’s editor and publisher, but he stubbornly insisted upon it and, in the end, had his way. The setting is Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, in 1930. Many of O’Hara’s stories would be set in Gibbsville, which was no doubt modeled upon his own hometown of Pottsville. He uses Gibbsville as a study of American society in microcosm and is, therefore, often compared to Balzac and Faulkner.

In fact, he referred to Gibbsville on at least one occasion as his version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Julian English is thirty years of age. He sells automobiles, and he and his wife, Caroline, are well accepted in Gibbsville society. The Great Depression has just to begun, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world of the roaring twenties has come to its apocalyptic end. For this reason, and because of certain stylistic similarities, O’Hara has been called Fitzgerald’s successor as a chronicler of American society. The novel is also reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis in its depiction of small-town businessmen—their shallowness, superficiality, and class consciousness. Some critics see the influence of Ernest Hemingway as well in the taut construction and spare language of the novel. In the foreword to the 1953 edition, O’Hara acknowledges his debt to Fitzgerald and Lewis but says that, unlike the case with his early short stories, he sees no Hemingway influence in Appointment in Samarra.

Very much like a Fitzgerald hero, Julian English drinks too much. He is subject to compulsions which threaten his marriage, his financial wellbeing, and his social status. He is not a stupid man.

He has some insight into his self-destructive nature, but he lacks the values that might save him from himself. He can see his life only in terms of money and social standing. It is not farfetched to compare Julian’s story to a Greek tragedy. In his own mind, he lives under a curse: His paternal grandfather committed suicide after embezzling a considerable amount of money. Julian’s father, a successful and straitlaced surgeon, fears that the character flaw has been passed down to his son.

Also as in a Greek tragedy, the novel recounts the final catastrophic events in a situation which has been building for many years.

Over several days at Christmastime, 1930, Julian suffers a series of social disasters. Harry Reilly is a rich acquaintance of Julian and Caroline who is constantly attempting to overcome his Irish-Catholic background and ascend Gibbsville’s social ladder. The previous summer, he lent Julian twenty thousand dollars when Julian’s Cadillac agency was in straitened circumstances. He now believes—or so Julian believes—that this gives him the right to make advances toward Caroline. At a Christmas party at the country club, Julian has again drunk too much. He snaps and throws a drink in Reilly’s face; Reilly is given a black eye by a big piece of ice. On the way home, Julian and Caroline have a terrible quarrel.

On Christmas Day, Julian falls out with another benefactor. Ed Charney is the local bootlegger. He has been a good customer and has helped Julian’s agency sell cars to other bootleggers. Charney owns a roadhouse called the Stage Coach, where his mistress, Helene Holman, sings. Hung over, unhappy, and drinking again, Julian goes to the Stage Coach. He dances with Helene and eventually leaves with her but passes out in the backseat of a car. Charney is furious, as is Caroline. The next day, she and Julian quarrel on the street. She cancels the big party they were to have given that evening.

She leaves him, determined to end their four-year-old marriage. Julian has lost his wife, has alienated the man who holds the mortgage on his agency and has a strong influence over potential Irish-Catholic customers, and has angered his powerful bootlegger.

Julian tries to work but cannot. He goes to his club for lunch in a foul mood. He ends up in an altercation with some elderly lawyers from another table. He hits one of them in the mouth and knocks out his false teeth. He goes home, where later he experiences his final fiasco. A society reporter calls at his door, wanting a story about the canceled party. Julian invites her in and begins drinking again. He makes a futile and humiliating attempt to seduce her. After her departure, he closes himself up in the garage and starts the engine of his car, keeping his appointment in Samarra. In the final pages of the book, others discuss Julian’s death but have apparently learned nothing from it.

O’Hara is rightly labeled a literary realist, but the heavily deterministic nature of this novel causes it to be classified as naturalistic. Although the author concentrates primarily on the rich and the upper middle class of Gibbsville, other strata of society are represented by Ed Charney, Helene Holman, and Al Grecco, Charney’s ex-convict handyman. O’Hara wrote that Appointment in Samarra was his second-favorite novel; he did not reveal which he ranked ahead of it.

From the Terrace is representative of O’Hara’s later novels. The narrative covers a period from the protagonist’s birth in 1897 to the postwar 1940’s. From the Terrace is much longer than O’Hara’s first novel and presents power struggles at the highest levels of business and government against a background of sexual intrigue and violent death. Thus, it provided excellent material for a motion picture and eventually became a successful vehicle for the actor Paul Newman.

Some similarities between From the Terrace and Appointment in Samarra are discernible. Raymond Alfred Eaton, called Alfred, is, like Julian English, born into the upper economic and social stratum of a small Pennsylvania town, Port Johnson. Alfred’s father, Samuel Eaton, owns the local steel mill. Like Julian English, Alfred Eaton is deeply suspicious of himself, largely because of an occurrence during his boyhood over which he had no control. His elder brother, William, was the favorite son and was destined to succeed his father as the first citizen of Port Johnson until he died of meningitis at fourteen. Alfred’s father can never bring himself to show his surviving son the same attention he lavished upon William.

Two later events reinforce Alfred’s sense of himself as a sort of jinx to others. He quarrels with his first love, sixteen-year-old Victoria Dockwiler, forbidding her to go riding in a borrowed Stutz Bearcat. She defies him and is killed in a car crash. Alfred then begins an affair with a family friend, Norma Budd, seven years older than he. Norma is later the victim of a married lover, who kills first her and then himself. Although it is irrational for Alfred to think that he corrupted Norma, he feels vaguely responsible later for her death.

Alfred attends Princeton University until the United States enters World War I. He serves with distinction as a naval officer and does not return to Princeton after the war. He also chooses to decline his father’s tepid offer of a job at the mill. Instead, he and Lex Thornton, a friend from Princeton, start an aircraft company together. Alfred meets eighteen-year-old Mary St. John at a party, and here begins the sort of sexual triangle typically found in O’Hara’s later novels.

Mary is engaged to Jim Roper, a pre-medical student. Alfred is strongly attracted to Mary, more sexually than romantically, and he succeeds in winning her away from Roper. Their marriage in the spring of 1920 corresponds exactly with the death of Alfred’s father. The marriage is not a happy one.

Mary has never completely broken her ties with Roper, and Alfred will later learn that she has resumed her relationship with her former fiancé. Mary’s adultery is especially sordid because Roper, who has become a psychiatrist, is also a declared homosexual who introduces her to a variety of deviant sexual practices. Meanwhile, Alfred has happened upon a young boy who has fallen through the ice into a pond. Alfred saves the child from drowning, thus earning the gratitude of the boy’s grandfather, James MacHardie. MacHardie is a rich and powerful Wall Street banker. He offers Alfred a job in New York, and the protagonist decides to leave his struggling company and take it. Alfred is an immediate success in banking, but he soon learns that he has relinquished his freedom of action. The image of MacHardie and Company is not to be tarnished by the divorce of any of its executives, so Alfred must stay married to Mary.

On a business trip back to Pennsylvania, Alfred meets and falls in love with Natalie Benziger. She becomes his mistress, but only after having suffered through a failed marriage of her own. Alfred and Mary’s adulterous marriage of convenience continues for more than twenty years but is finally destroyed by the dislocations of World War II. Alfred takes a leave from MacHardie and Company to become an assistant secretary of the Navy in Washington, D.C. Mary’s behavior becomes even more outrageous, and the couple’s elder son, Rowland, is killed while in training as a naval aviator.

Alfred feels compelled to resign his government post because of the questionable practices of some of his former business associates. In his absence, Alfred’s enemies have forced him out of the company. Foremost among these enemies is Creighton Duffy, a prominent lawyer, who is James MacHardie’s son-in-law and the father of the boy whose life Alfred saved. The Eatons are finally divorced.

Like Julian English in the earlier novel, Alfred Eaton is destined to fall. His neglected boyhood taught him to rely upon himself, and the resulting independence and individuality accounted for his early success; however, it failed to teach him how to connect with and cultivate others. He won Mary’s heart but earned the undying enmity of his rival.

He saved the boy, Sandy Duffy, but in later years neither Sandy nor his father like the man to whom they owe so much. Creighton Duffy has been waiting for the right moment to bring Alfred down.

As the novel ends, Alfred is recovering from an illness brought on by the travails of his public and private life. He is unable to find another position, having cut himself off from the business and government arenas in which he previously thrived. He is financially secure, but he is not yet fifty and is restive at the prospect of a future of enforced idleness.

He is now married to Natalie, but even their happiness is marred by her loss of the child she was carrying. Natalie is thirty-eight and is unlikely to conceive again.

Other members of the large cast of characters are Jack Tom Smith, a Texas oilman and Alfred’s temporary ally, and Tom Rothermel, a union organizer. (O’Hara often balances his privileged protagonist with a working-class character.) As usual in O’Hara’s fiction, the physical details are flawless. The clothing, architecture, technology, and language of the novel’s succeeding decades are authentic down to the minutest point.

O’Hara is an acclaimed master of the short-story genre. His numerous stories of the 1930’s and 1940’s were, as a rule, very short. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, pieces he wrote became longer and less numerous (he did, however, still average more than one short story per month during the last ten years of his life). “Christmas Poem” is one of the later, longer stories. It was first published on December 19, 1964, in The New Yorker.

Billy Warden has just arrived home from Dartmouth College for the Christmas vacation. The setting is Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, during some period earlier than the time of publication. No dates are given, but one character drives a new Marmon (not a Dort, his girlfriend insists), Billy orders a lemon phosphate at the drugstore soda fountain, and there is a discussion of getting a couple of pints of whiskey on credit, a suggestion of the Prohibition era. The Stage Coach Inn, featured so prominently in Appointment in Samarra, is mentioned in passing, though now spelled “Stagecoach.”

For the first six pages, the story is almost exclusively dialogue as the Warden family chats at the dinner table. Clearly, Billy is loved and valued by his parents and his older sister, Barbara (Bobby). For the period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, he has been invited for skiing and a house party at Montrose, Pennsylvania, above Scranton. The hostess will be Henrietta (Henny) Cooper, who comes from a very wealthy family.

Billy excuses himself from dinner, although he really enjoys being with his family, and goes downtown in search of his friends. Billy spends an aimless evening. He fails to get a date with Irma Hipple, a young woman nicknamed “the Nipple” and rumored to go “all the way,” even though none of the local boys has actually made the trip. In a crap game, he loses the ten dollars his father gave him, and he spends his loose change in a game of pool. He hopes to pick up a girl when the cinema lets out, but no appropriate target appears.

A familiar O’Hara motif is introduced when Teddy Choate asserts the superiority of his family’s Yale University connections over Billy’s matriculation at Dartmouth and, in turn, Billy lords it over Andy Phillips, a student at State. When Billy returns home, he learns he has had a long-distance call from the Scranton operator, suggesting that perhaps his relationship with Henny Cooper is more than casual. He also finds his father writing a Christmas poem to his mother. Mr. Warden has written such a poem every Christmas for twenty-six years, but Billy has learned of the practice only tonight.

He goes to bed wondering if Henny’s father has ever written a poem to her mother. The reader is reminded of the opening chapter of Appointment in Samarra. That novel begins not with the desperately unhappy Julian English, but with one of his salesmen, Luther L. Fliegler. Julian’s crumbling marriage stands in stark contrast to the stable, happy relationship of Luther and his wife, Irma. A critic has remarked that going to Hell in style is O’Hara’s one and only theme. The reader wonders if Billy Warden will forsake the loving environment of his home and family for a world of house parties and skiing excursions among the rich—and concludes that probably he will.

“Good Samaritan” first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post of November 30, 1968. As the story begins, Mary Wood is hosting twenty people for a buffet lunch. Her party may be associated with a golf tournament that is being held that weekend.

The setting is not identified specifically, but it is an affluent community of suburban or summer homes in the present day. When the Reeds—George and Carrie—arrive, they ask where Willoughby Wood is. Mary confides to them that her husband has been missing for two days, but she tells the other guests that he has been suddenly called away to Washington. Because it is Sunday, Mary’s story is unconvincing. Only one of her guests, however, is sufficiently interested in the whereabouts of Willoughby Wood to challenge her. After all the other guests have left, Agatha Surtees, a “notorious stayer,” attempts to intrude upon the private conversation Mary has been waiting to have with the Reeds. Mary practically expels Agatha with physical force, and the latter goes huffing off to her hired limousine. Agatha’s age is given as fifty-two, Willoughby’s as fifty-nine, so the reader infers that the other characters are in their fifties as well.

Mary receives a call from Lieutenant Hackenschmidt of the sheriff’s patrol. Willoughby has been found wandering aimlessly in East Quantuck, unshaven, disheveled, and without money, watch, or identification. When picked up, he was not intoxicated—he appeared to have suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. The Reeds set out to take Mary to the substation where her husband is being held, but it is soon decided that George will drop Carrie off at their home. As George and Mary drive on alone, the reader is furnished with much exposition.

Willoughby Wood quit working about ten years earlier when he inherited his father’s money, and the Woods’ marriage has been in a precipitous decline ever since that time. Willoughby is estranged from their daughter, Marietta, because he insists that her husband and the father of her two children is a homosexual. Years before, Mary and George Reed were romantically involved to some unspecified degree, and Mary proposes that they become lovers now. George is receptive to the idea, but he tells her that he already has a mistress in Detroit.

Mary also confesses, for the first time, to a sexual indiscretion with another member of their set only a week before serving as a bridesmaid in his wedding.

At the sheriff’s substation, Lieutenant Hackenschmidt is very deferential to George, whom he recognizes as the president of the hospital. Hackenschmidt believes that Willoughby has been “rolled,” although he bears no bruises or other signs of having been attacked. Another possibility, suggested though never stated, is that the missing identification and personal possessions represent Willoughby’s temporary rejection of his identity.

Willoughby is released, but on the way home he becomes boorish toward his wife almost immediately. He is obsessed with the idea that Mary had an affair while visiting Marietta in California (which, in fact, she did), and he begins to accuse her again. George, the contemporary Good Samaritan, becomes exasperated and puts Willoughby out of the car a half a mile from home. Mary declines to join her husband on the side of the road, and the story ends. The narrative is carried forward almost exclusively by means of dialogue.

“The Journey to Mount Clemens” was written in 1966 or earlier, but The Saturday Evening Post did not accept it for publication until 1974. It was reprinted that same year in Good Samaritan, and Other Stories. “The Journey to Mount Clemens” is narrated in the first-person voice and contains a number of autobiographical elements.

The time period of the story is never stated outright, but all the details point to the 1920’s. The narrator is eighteen years old, is Catholic, has just been expelled from prep school, and has recently acquired a job through the influence of his physician father. Despite not having an engineering degree, he is working with an engineering crew from an electric power corporation. All the preceding biographical details apply to the young John O’Hara as much as to his narrator. Further, the narrator is more or less an objective observer, not the protagonist.

The scene is eastern Pennsylvania in winter. The narrator’s crew is making a tour of power plants, putting a valuation on the entire physical property of each. They have just finished their work at plant number 4 and are having their supper at Dugan’s Hotel before heading to their next assignment, a new substation at Mount Clemens. Carmichael, the chief of their party, has driven them relentlessly during the two weeks at number 4, and them end is like him heartily. He wants to end the tour quickly so that he can return to the main office in New York, then join a dam-building project in the Sudan.

No one in the crew dares to challenge the austere Carmichael except King, a man who has worked all over the world for the company and who once was Carmichael’s superior. The narrator observes that the company has gotten everything out of King that he had to give and has shunted him off to finish his career in a minor job. The narrator speculates that Carmichael will eventually suffer the same fate. When the conversation turns to Carmichael’s upcoming trip to North Africa, he and King have words.

It has been snowing heavily for two hours. The crew starts the hazardous twenty-eight-mile trip to Mount Clemens in two cars. Carmichael, King, and Thompson go first in the Paige; the narrator and Edmunds follow in the Studebaker. The company has furnished drivers—Carney for the Paige and Ed Stone (Stoney) for the Studebaker. The journey is slow, uncomfortable, and dangerous. Either of the cars may stall, leaving its passengers stranded in below-zero weather, or, worse still, may plunge three or four hundred feet down the embankment into the timber. As in other O’Hara stories, the working-class characters (here, Carney and Stoney) are less interesting than their economic and social superiors but are also more stable, clear-headed, and dependable.

The drivers handle their automobiles admirably in the snow, and, when the bickering between King and Carmichael erupts into fisticuffs, with the former giving the latter a bloody nose, “Sergeant” Carney is the man who restores order. He sends King back to ride the rest of the way in the Studebaker.

Amid Edmunds’s repeated assertions that King has finally ruined himself with the company, King wraps a blanket about himself and goes to sleep. When the little caravan finally reaches Mount Clemens, Edmunds tries to rouse King but discovers that he is dead.

Again, O’Hara has traced the decline of the once powerful (or rich or prominent) to its ultimate conclusion. King’s regal name adds an ironic touch to the story.

Summary

O’Hara has been likened to F. Scott Fitzgerald for interpreting the United States of the 1930’s through fiction as Fitzgerald had the United States of the 1920’s. He has been likened to Ernest Hemingway in the cleanness and spareness of his style.

He has been likened to the great naturalistic writers because of his trapped, doomed characters. The implication of the several comparisons is that he reminds the reader of these writers but fails to reach their level of achievement. What can be said with certainty is that he was a master craftsman, a prolific creator of works which have demonstrably pleased the reading public for many years.

Bibliography

By the Author