John O’Hara (1905–1970) was one of the most prominent
American writers of the twentieth century. Championed by Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, he wrote
seventeen novels, including Appointment in Samarra, his
first; BUtterfield 8, which was made into a film starring
Elizabeth Taylor; Pal Joey, which was adapted into a Broadway
musical as well as a film starring Frank Sinatra; and Ten
North Frederick, which won the National Book Award. He has had more
stories published in The New Yorker than anyone else in
the history of the magazine. Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he
lived for many years in New York and in Princeton, New Jersey,
where he died.
Lorenz Hart (1895–1943) was an acclaimed lyricist best known
for his collaborations with Richard Rodgers on a number of Broadway
scores. His many hit songs with Rodgers include “Blue Moon,” “My
Funny Valentine,” and, for Pal Joey, “Bewitched, Bothered, and
Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book.” Born in Harlem, Hart spent
his life in New York City.
Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) was one of the most influential
composers in Broadway history. A longtime collaborator with Lorenz
Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, he wrote more than forty musicals,
including South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music, and
Oklahoma! He was the first person to win all the major awards in
his field—a Grammy, an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony, and a Pulitzer
Prize—and, along with Hammerstein, was named one the twenty most
influential artists of the twentieth century by Time magazine and
CBS News. Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre was dedicated to him
in 1990.
Thomas Mallon (foreword) is the author of numerous
novels, including Finale: A Novel of the Reagan
Years and Watergate, which was a finalist for the
PEN/Faulkner Award. The recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller
fellowships, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for
reviewing and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters for distinguished prose style, he has been published
in The New
Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York
Times Book Review. He is a professor of English at George
Washington University.
“O’Hara, by many standards, including sales, is one of the most
successful writers in the English language. . . . [His character]
Joey Evans was a lowlife heel who bragged, charmed, cheated and
lied his way into low-watt stardom. But as characters go, he sure
lasted.” —Scott Simon, NPR’s Weekend Edition
“As Mad Men continues to draw big ratings, I sense that
O’Hara’s moment for a really breakout revival . . . may at last be
upon us. . . . If this is your first encounter with John O’Hara, I
can only say, in the words of Joey: ‘Low and behold.’ ” —Thomas
Mallon, from the Foreword
“There can be no doubt but that [Pal Joey is] part of his best
work.” —The New York Times
“O’Hara was probably the most gifted writer of dialogue in mid-20th
century American fiction. And when he gets around to fracturing
dialogue the way people do in real life, he’s very funny. He
doesn’t overdo it. It bounces right up from the page at you. If you
read the sentences out loud—and of course what he did was adapt his
book for the stage so they could be read out loud—they just land on
a dime, all of them.” —Thomas Mallon, NPR’s Weekend Edition
“If ever an author was ripe for a critical rebranding, it’s John
O’Hara.” —Jonathan Dee, from the Introduction to Ten North
Frederick
“O’Hara remains one of America’s greatest social novelists of the
twentieth century. . . . He captured one of the most far-reaching
social transformations in American history.” —The Atlantic
“[O’Hara] was as acute a social observer as Fitzgerald, as spare a
stylist as Hemingway.” —Los Angeles Times
“An author I love is John O’Hara. . . . I think he's been forgotten
by time, but for dialogue lovers, he’s a goldmine of inspiration.”
—Douglas Coupland, Shelf Awareness
“O’Hara occupies a unique position in our contemporary literature.
. . . He 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.” —Lionel Trilling, The New
York Times
“Pal Joey is successful as satire, because Mr. O’Hara is not afraid
to go the whole hog.” —Edmund Wilson, The New Republic
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