Penguin Classics
400 pages, $17

Review by Bess Winter

John O’ Hara is considered the father of the “New Yorker story,” a term thrown around in M.F.A. workshops as shorthand for conservative, formally traditional, and WASPy. The New York Stories, a new edition of 30+ of O’Hara’s collected works published between the 1930s and early 1970s, is a study of class, ambition, and the extinct publishing landscape that took O’Hara in and fostered him.

O’Hara won a National Book Award (for Ten North Frederick, which was adapted into a film starring Gary Cooper), and was the author of BUtterfield 8, whose film adaptation earned Elizabeth Taylor her first Oscar, and whose title is the namesake for a slew of coffee shops and vintage stores nationwide. From the 1920s through the 1970s, he shaped the urban American short story landscape and, by extension, the mid-century American aesthetic (think highballs, Cary Grant, The Oak Room), by manufacturing hundreds of stories. With the publication of The New York Stories (and new editions of a clutch of O’Hara’s novels with introductions by Lorin Stein and others), Penguin attempts to wedge O’Hara, who—despite his many successes—has always been more of a writer’s writer than a literary great, somewhere in between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Continue reading →