Sermons and Soda Water consists of 3 novellas which involve the same person -- James Mallory. Mallory is thought to be the alter ego of O'Hara. The first story "The Girl on the Baggage Truck" is a story of the younger Mallory barely avoiding being pulled down by involvement with an aspiring actress. The second, my favorite, "Imagine Kissing Pete" is the story of a bad marriage which goes good. I'm surprised no one ever made a movie of this one. The final one is a story of Mallory's senior years. He meets up with an old friend he has gradually moved away from, mainly due to the friend's marriage to a woman no one likes. Mallory is surprised to discover that his friend genuinely loved his wife. These stories remain popular because, like Appointment in Samarra, they highlight O'Hara's ability with dialogue and the description.

As I read more and more O'Hara it is beginning to dawn on me that he is one of the pre-eminent American writers of the 20th Century. This book, in particular, looks at so many big themes across so many characters and storylines that it should be listed with the best novels of the century. Works by his better-known contemporary (but hardly peer) Fitzgerald are puny next to this writer's best stuff.

BEING AN AVID JOHN WAYNE FAN I AM COMPELLED TO KEEP THIS BOOK IN SPITE OF THE HAPHAZARD PRESENTATION OF HIS CAREER. THE QUALITY OF PAPER,PICTURES,AND PRINTING WERE EXCELLENT. IN MY OPINION THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS SHOULD HAVE BEEN PRESENTED IN THE ORDER THEY OCCURRED.

YOURS TRULY, ROBERT L. JORDAN

Enhanced with a foreword by actress Maureen O'Hara, and graced with an informative text by Jane Pattie, John Wayne: There Rode A Legend is a gorgeous, superbly illustrated coffee table book showcasing the life, career, movies, deeds, and memories of the world famous actor John Wayne, best known for his many classic American West movies. Filled with both color photographs and black-and-white television and movie stills from before the firm establishment of color TV, John Wayne: There Rode A Legend is a remarkable tour of and tribute to the actor's life and work, from the 30's to the 60's. Of special note are the highlights that reveal John Wayne's humanitarian legacy, from when he had a gravely ill Navajo girl flown to a hospital 100 miles away on his personal plane to the creation of the John Wayne Cancer Institute years after the great actor's death from stomach cancer. John Wayne: There Rode A Legend is beyond compare and enthusiastically recommended for Western film buffs and the legions of fans of a truly unique actor and his enduring work.

All I can say about this book is that it is the best book out there about our national treasure, John Wayne. He is as popular today as he has ever been and it was a pleasure to find this book through a friend. It's a huge book, with great, rare photographs about Duke's West. I had read some of the other reviews, and I was also not aware that Duke was a cattle rancher in real life. The book is brimming over with great art and photographs. If your looking for a gift for a friend or just to give yourself a treat, this is the book for you. I was impressed as much as the great 'impressiveness' of the book.

O'Hara was a brilliant poet who seemingly had nothing to write about. His language is incredibly imaginative, and his productivity was astounding. But in the end the vast majority of his poems were little more than frivolous ditties about his friends and the artsy scene around New York City. It's almost a shame that with his amazing talents O'Hara didn't live in a somewhat more challenging set of circumstances - it would have been interesting to hear what he had to say. But reading his poems is like reading the work of an incredibly gifted, yet ultimately vacuous, artist.

An earlier reviewer describes O'Hara's poetry as shallow and vacuous. Shallow, maybe. But not vacuous. O'Hara's interested in the minutiae of daily life - buying a pack of Gauloises on the way to friends for dinner, seeing a headline about Lana Turner collapsing, the hard hats worn by construction workers. Read one poem and you might come away thinking it's trivial. But his life's work - taken as a whole - is an intelligent, alert, funny and perceptive record of a life lived to the full (I think someone else may have said that before me, somewhere). Thing is, O'Hara's interested in surfaces - things, events, trivia - because they have meaning. So his poetry is shallow in a very real and virtuous sense. He's not trying to make big statements, a la Charles Olson or Robert Lowell. What I find amazing is how moving his poetry can so often be, as in The Day Lady Died. On one reading, it's simply a list of things he does on the way to friends for dinner. But the impact is enormous. The poem gets you right up close to O'Hara as he learns of Billie Holiday's death and remembers hearing her sing. Nothing vacuous about that.

This poet changed my life. This poet had style, made his own breaks (luck), had great friends because he gave a damn about them, and loved art unconditionally in any form but with a special love for the city, for the life and art and noise (music) of the city. This poet wore a tie and jacket and swiveled out the door of the Museum of Modern Art with more hip in his pocket than you, Bro. This poet was gay and and every man considered him their best friend and every woman wanted to sleep with him. This poet grew up near Boston, went to the Navy and Hafvard and spent a year in Ann Arbor but was New York all the way, the very heart and soul of New York and the New York School of poets. This poet extends the line from Keats to Rimbaud into the American future.

At the end of every year, Brian Lamb talks to three authors on a special Booknotes on C-SPAN. Last year one of the guests was Shelby Foote & he said that he was reading some great American authors who folks had sort of forgotten. One of them was John O'Hara. Now I've seen dozens of his books at book sales, so I knew two things: one, he sold a ton of books; two, folks aren't reading them anymore. So I picked up From the Terrace, Appointment in Samarra & a couple collections of the short stories & loved them all. It was very heartening to see that he made this list (Modern Library Top 100).

Appointment tells the story of Julian English, a WASP nervously perched atop the social heap in Gibbsville, PA. At a Christmas party in 1930, he throws a drink in the face of the town's leading Catholic businessman and thus begins his downward spiral.

O'Hara etches very sharp portraits of characters from the varying strata of society & presents a vivid tale of an America & it's establishment shaken by the oncoming Depression and the rise of new Ethnic groups.

GRADE: A

'Appointment in Samarra' is a great novel. I was led to read it by an article in the Atlantic Monthly that lamented the pretentiousness of much of contemporary writing. Not only is the writing pretentious, but it doesn't say anything intelligible. 'Appointment in Sammara', by contrast, tells a story in a direct manner while still revealing to us hidden truths about the human spirit. It's not giving anything away to say that the story concerns the self-destruction of one Julian English. Julian is suave, Protestant, lives in the finest neighborhood, and hangs out with the in crowd. But Julian makes the mistake of throwing his drink into the face of a powerful, nouveau riche Irish Catholic. Suddenly, Julian's support structures don't seem so firm. Julian's descent is heart breaking because, although he is not an especially likeable person, John O'Hara still manages to make us care for him. O'Hara's book was prophetic in that it portrays the end of WASP domination in America. The book takes place in 1930 and was published in 1934 ' just six years after the Catholic Al Smith was denied the presidency by a virulent anti-Catholic backlash led, in part, by the Klan. We're told that some of the locals in Pottsville are members of the the Klan. Twenty-six years later, in 1960, an Irish Catholic would be elected president. Appointment in Samarra is a must read for those who are serious about the American novel.

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, C.S.Lewis, John Cheever. If any one of these authors was ever important to you, please pick up O'Hara. He's critical to understanding twentieth century American authors. At the very least, you can engage in the unending debate on whether he's worthy of joining this pantheon of writers. Worthy of an airport paperback rack? Smalltime trashy romance writer? Or do you think he paints a richly textured canvas of an America and its high society about to be turn the corner on the first half of the 20th century? An important Irish-Catholic writer?

My tip: read this book. If nothing else you'll learn about bituminous and anthracitic coal, the United Mine Workers, how to mix a martini, (and throw one), why fraternities were ever important, and what a flivver was. It's certainly a period piece, and O'Hara does not hold back with the language of the jazz age...which may confuse modern readers (it was a gay party, his chains dropped a link, etc.) In fact, O'Hara was an early adopter of using slang and vernacular in writing the spoken word, and you can be the judge of whether or not he gets an Irish mobster's (or a "high hat's") tone correctly.

He's really at his best with character development, because Julian English (our protaganist) is our bigoted confidante, our tiresome spouse, our wretched boss, our surly neighbor, our spoiled college-boy brat, our pretentious friend and our preening big man about town all in one. O'Hara waltzes us through Julian's demise and we root for him, for one more chance, all the way down.

Some good stories fill this volume. But the recent attempt at a John O'Hara revival failed for a reason. He's not that good. If you've read one O'Hara story, you've read them all. O'Hara's same obsessions are played out in every story. His two obsessions were 1) Status 2) The obsession with and assumption that if a male and female are left alone together, one will immediately try and jump the other's bones. Maybe I've led a dull life, but I've actually been left alone with girls and women when neither I nor they tried to bed the other. The other thing is O'Hara thought he was one of the greatest writers ever...but, by his own admission, was not that well read. He mainly read Hemingway and Fitzgerald over and over. Not bad role models at all. But O'Hara famously said in a review of a Hemingway book that Hemingway was the greatest writer since Shakespeare (suggesting, of course, that O'Hara was the SECOND greatest writer since Shakespeare!). But O'Hara once responsed to a critic who said his writing resembled Tolstoy's (pulEEASE!) that, "Gee, I've never even READ Tolstoy." Now how could O'Hara say Hemingway was the greatest writer since Shakespeare when O'Hara had never read Tolstoy!!! Even ego-ridden Hemingway admitted Tolstoy was a greater writer than himself. And how can a literary writer dare sit down to write when he hasn't yet read the master, Tolstoy. O'Hara was okay, but not great. Yeah, no wonder that revival attempt in the mid-90's flopped.

This is an astonishing collection of short stories from a past master that everyone has forgotten, but could surely learn from, or relish. I liked the novellas best, including "Imagine Kissing Pete", "Ninety Minutes Away", and "Natica Jackson." What I was astonished by was how quickly they were read; it was like watching and feeling life unfolding before my eyes. The first masterpiece in this collection is "Over the River and Through the Wood" that must be one of the most disturbing stories ever written. It is disgusting to me that not a single O'Hara story was included in the recent "Best American Short Stories of the Century"; if a claim can be made that Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald must be included, then so must O'Hara. John O'Hara is an American legend. He should be revived.

If you've read one John O'Hara short story, you've read them all. All characters are obsessed with their status in life, and if a man and a woman are alone together, you just have to wait until one will try to get the other in the sack. If you had a 95 year old grandmother in a scene with an 18 year old male high school student, you could almost expect that one would make a pass at the other. THE DOCTOR'S SON is the best O'Hara short story I've read. It is excellent. Read that one, enjoy it. But you need read no more, since everything in that story is in every other O'Hara story.

If John O'Hara isn't one of our greatest American writers, who is? O'Hara, along with writers like John Cheever and Irwin Shaw, chronicle the American suburban experience during the middle part of the twentieth century and we should not miss out on their observations. But what do you see when you go to Barnes & Noble or Borders? Racks and racks of ridiculous drivel hoisted on us by greedy publishers and other fast-buck artists. Mindless entertainment rules while O'Hara, Cheever, Shaw and their like are pushed off the book shelves and out of circulation. The tone and empathy of these Masters will forever provide an insight into our American experience that you won't get from the trash that we now seem to be preoccupied with. OK, OK, OK. I read some of this current trash, too, but I haven't forgotten the great American Triumvirate.... O'Hara, Cheever and Shaw!

Grace Caldwell was the young woman who stood out in her community, for her wealth, her athleticism and her confident, striking appearance. She was beloved of her family and suffered little in the way of childhood traumas or incidents that might darken her satisfied sense of life and herself. She was also a girl and later a woman with the sex drive of what at the time was considered- a man. More than that, she acted on it and what began in youth became a part of the rest of her life, that is the addition of a secret sexual fire and behavior that smoldered through her position as nothing less than wife, mother and social leader of the town.
The Rage to Live is a book that accurately and presciently tells of an era of transition. In that Pennsylvania small town, the country and the heroine; a transition was occuring wherein the upper classes would no longer be secure to behave however they chose. It was also an era when over-indulgence itself was in the process of entering the mainstream, i.e. was democratized. That did not lead to an increased forgiveness in the part of the newly liberated, however. The old horse riding, martini drinking gentry has transformed even more over the years, but the Grace Caldwells and their trademark entitlement still can be found in various suburbs in and around the east coast and in the summers along the various coasts. Grace and her family and her fate makes for a great story, dated, but so what.

O'Hara is one of the most underrated of American writers. _Rage to Live_ builds a strong character in Grace Caldwell Tate-- her passions are handled with delicacy and skill and her story is told with a rare combination of affection and judgement. A good place to begin with O'Hara if you don't know his work already.

It's a turgid, self-important piece of trash, but I found it impossible to put down. (I also felt vaguely bilious after reading it, rather like I had eaten too much cheap candy at one sitting). It's not nearly as entertaining as the movie, and it isn't even great trash (e.g., "David Copperfield"), but he knows how to spell and can describe things fairly well (unlike Steele and Balducci) and he can tell a story (unlike Harold Robbins) reasonably well. One thing that interests me about these "organization man" novels of the 50's is how alike they are in "texture" (or something), even when they are about very different things. For example, there is something about "Cash McCall", "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit", and this book that seem quite similar, but the plot summaries of these books don't overlap at all. I think that it's a sort of existential nausea that permeates the pretentious popular writing of the time. (It doesn't get into the movies made from these books, though.)

Anyway, this book is about a guy who is so damaged by his childhood that he throws away his integrity to be a "success", and then throws that away, too. But since you don't like the guy, it doesn't bother you to watch him self-destruct. (Paul Newman plays an entirely different person in the movie, as you would guess.)

This was my favorite book for about a decade, so it is difficult to write this review. I read it four times - all between the ages of 18 and 27. What did I love? It's tough, funny, and creates a vast and quite realistic panorama of northeast Pa. society in the early 1900s, Long Island society in the 1920s, NY investment banking, Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, Washington during WWII. The writing is sharp, acerbic, extraordinary in its thorough descriptions of people's faces, haircuts, favorite drinks, cars, hats, umbrellas, cufflinks, watches, gloves, and what they signify socially. O'Hara is justly famous for the realism and biting wit of his dialogue, the great and easy flow of his narrative. One feels that there are ALWAYS many characters in his novels and short stories about whom others will say "oh, smart guy, eh?" and "take a poke at him", which is fun. It was all thrillingly adult when I was that age to read these - "ah, so that's the kind of sophistication I have to look forward to".

Elements I've since noticed: - O'Hara seems to feel that to tack on bleak endings for his most-liked characters is to be smart and naturalistic - yet in this case, the (quite vivid) Alfred Eaton character simply seems stronger than this. O'Hara also has a conventional sense of "normal sex", outside of which the reader is to know the character is truly evil (i.e., unable to love). O'Hara packs his novels with coincidence - as an adult, I have been truly disappointed that I DON'T run into acquaintances in restaurants, theaters, trains all the time! Finally, O'Hara's virtuous characters do not come across nearly as realistically.

In summary, O'Hara is limited - perhaps most by his times and his perception of the permanence of what are really quite transitory measures of quality in people. However, he's still very enjoyable to read. I think Updike wrote once that in the Orient, he'd be known as "Old Man Who Loves Writing" and that is perfectly true - the reader feels it. He's VERY readable, intelligent, but perhaps not truly wise in the more abiding of matters.

John O'Hara once said that one of his driving instincts in writing was to chronicle the first half of the 20th Century. A great deal of his large body of work does just this. "From the Terrace" is not only one of his best novels, but is sound history as well. We are introduced to poor Alfred Eaton who overcomes a bad childhood to become a success as an adult to become .... perhaps what he was meant to be all along. It's part Man in a Gray Flannel Suit and part Greek Tragedy. As to what it chronicles: the old boy WASP network of prep school / Harvard or Yale or Princeton / club life. One's early life provides networking forever for the fortunate upper class white male in that upper class. One sees how these same males get tapped during WW2 to fill the better positions opening up in Washington thanks to the war effort. O'Hara excells at the tiny details that expand in your mind to tell an entire story. His dialogue (particularly between men and women) sounds true. Given the time in which he wrote, O'Hara got away with a lot of explicit sex. The lead character commits adultery and is all the more happy for it. If you've seen the movie with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, you should know that the book ends does not end with Paul Newman walking down a Manhattan street happy to be able to marry his mistress. In the book, he marries a second time, his naval career ends, and he finds his life taking a new turn.

I have yet to see this movie, but I was given a vivid picture from reading this book. Being placed in the 1930's, I was almost expecting to be taken to a time and place alien to me. I was astounded in the way O'Hara's society hasn't changed much from the one today. The only difference is that the issues in this novel are more plevalent today than in the hidden crevices of yesterday.

I attribute this comparison to his level of writing. If everyone could write like this, all books would be timeless. As well as the lush descriptions of New York, from the start, it is difficult not to feel for Gloria. The rest of the story tries to explain why she is such a person to feel for.

I enjoyed seeing a colorful portrait of the thirties as well as getting swept up in the tragic story of a girl who has an inevitable future.

In his astoundingly productive career, John O'Hara wrote 402 stories and 14 novels. Reportedly, he drove fellow staffers at The New Yorker to fury because he could sit down at a typewriter and just bang away at the keys nonstop until a finished story rolled out. (These facts come from John Sacret Young's intro to this book.) I've read several of the story collections and a couple of the novels and O'Hara's style is fairly distinctive. He plumbs the faultlines of society where the slumming rich meet with the aspiring poor. His stories are driven by dialogue and crisp, witty, trenchant dialogue at that, much like the hard-boiled private eye novels of Hammett and Chandler. His tone is cynical; his subjects doomed. You get the sense that if he knew a pedestrian was about to be run down in front of him, he wouldn't even turn his head. And after witnessing the accident he'd race to a typewriter to share the ugly scene with his readers. He is a kind of an upscale noir writer, a tony purveyor of pulp fiction.

BUtterfield 8 is a roman a clef (based on a real incident) and you can see why the story appealed to him. On June 8, 1931, the dead body of a young woman named Starr Faithfull--no seriously, her name was Starr Faithfull--was found on Long Beach, Long Island. Subsequent reporting uncovered a life of easy morals and much time spent in speakeasies and such piquant details as her childhood molestation by a former mayor of Boston. Despite rumors of political motives for her murder and a supposed secret diary, no one was ever charged in her death.

O'Hara recreates her as Gloria Wandrous, and introduces her on the novel's first page as follows:

On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before. One minute she was asleep, the next she was completely awake and dumped into despair.

This is no happy go lucky flapper he offers up. From that first despairing morning, when she steals a mink coat from the apartment where she wakes in order to replace the dress that her date tore off of her the night before, O'Hara details a brutal, unhappy, ultimately empty life that spirals down towards the inevitable senseless death.

O'Hara said that in Gloria Wandrous he created Elizabeth Taylor before there was an Elizabeth Taylor (she starred in a movie version), just as in Pal Joey, he created Sinatra before Sinatra. In hindsight, the better comparison is probably to Marilyn Monroe. Regardless, his portrayal of a city girl on the edge, and of her eventual destruction, is iconographic and, if it did not create Taylor and Monroe, it certainly influenced writers from Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's) to Jay McInerney (Story of My Life).

I wouldn't recommend trying to tackle his entire ouvure in one fell swoop, but you should definitely try out this one, Appointment in Samarra, From the Terrace and some of the stories. For my money, the incisive savagery with which he lays bare his generation should rank him with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

GRADE: B+

I have enjoyed O'Hara in the past and I had always wanted to read this book. When I saw that Fran Leibowitz wrote the introduction, I thought "it's time."
O'Hara sets the book in the early 1930's in New York City. He focuses his sharp powers of observation on the "speakeasy" class of New York: those individuals with still enough wealth to spend time in illegal bars drinking their worries away. At first, you think "ah, these are the beautiful people." Of course, soon you realize that these individuals are anything but beautiful.
The heroine, or anti-heroine, Gloria, is a beautiful, young woman of loose morals and some inherited wealth. She is smart-we're told she could have gone to Smith-and underneath everything, kind. But sexual abuse early on triggered a rampant promiscuity.
O'Hara specializes in delineating the subtle class differences-the Catholics who went to Yale as opposed to the Wasps-that existed at this time. He structures class systems in his novels as rigidly as any Brahmin.
I would recommend this book for individuals who enjoy contemporary fiction, particularly books set in New York that depict wealthy, beautiful people. (If you like Fitzgerald, you'll like this book.) Both men and women can enjoy this book-as Fran Leibowitz says in her introduction, "it's a young man's book" in many ways.
I would not recommend this book for individuals who dislike "dated" fiction (though this book is surprising fresh in many ways) or books that verge on melodrama.
One note about the Leibowitz's introduction: I found it excellent. She has some acute observations-sex is an animal desire, the perception of it human and changing according to mores in vogue-that have stayed with me.