约翰·奥哈拉

约翰·奥哈拉（英语：John O'Hara，1905年1月31日—1970年4月11日），美国作家，代表作是《相约萨马拉》，曾入选20世纪百大英文小说。

John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was an American writer. He was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style. He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is debated, his work was praised by such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his champions rank him highly among the major under-appreciated American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach literature at the college level.

"O’Hara may not have been the best story writer of the twentieth century, but he is the most addictive," wrote Lorin Stein, then editor-in-chief of The Paris Review, in a 2013 appreciation of O'Hara's work. Stein added, "You can binge on his collections the way some people binge on Mad Men, and for some of the same reasons. On the topics of class, sex, and alcohol—that is, the topics that mattered to him—his novels amount to a secret history of American life."

O'Hara achieved substantial commercial success in the years after World War II, when his fiction repeatedly appeared in Publishers Weekly's annual list of the top ten best-selling fiction works in the United States. These best sellers included A Rage to Live (1949), Ten North Frederick (1955), From the Terrace (1959), Ourselves to Know (1960), Sermons and Soda Water (1960) and Elizabeth Appleton (1963). Five of his works were adapted into popular films in the 1950s and 1960s.

Despite the popularity of these books, O'Hara accumulated detractors due to his outsized and easily bruised ego, alcoholic irascibility, long-held resentments and politically conservative views that were unfashionable in literary circles in the 1960s. After O'Hara's death, John Updike, an admirer of O'Hara's writing, said that the prolific author "out-produced our capacity for appreciation; maybe now we can settle down and marvel at him all over again."

Early life and education

O'Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, to an affluent Irish American family. Though his family lived among the gentry of eastern Pennsylvania during his childhood, O'Hara's Irish Catholic background gave him the perspective of an outsider to elite WASP society, a theme he wrote of again and again. He attended the secondary school Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New York, where he was named Class Poet for Class of 1924. His father died about that time, leaving him unable to afford Yale, the college of his dreams, and he fell overnight from the privileged life of a well-heeled doctor's family, including club memberships, riding and dance lessons, fancy cars in the barn, and domestic servants in the house. By all accounts, this social fall afflicted O'Hara with status anxiety for the rest of his life, honing the cutting social class awareness that characterizes his work.

Brendan Gill, who worked with O'Hara at the New Yorker, claimed that O'Hara was nearly obsessed with a sense of social inferiority due to not having attended Yale. "People used to make fun of the fact that O'Hara wanted so desperately to have gone to Yale, but it was never a joke to O'Hara. It seemed... that there wasn't anything he didn't know about it in regard to college and prep-school matters." Hemingway once said someone should "start a bloody fund to send John O'Hara to Yale." As his literary acclaim grew, O'Hara yearned for an honorary degree from Yale, but never received it. According to Gill, the college was unwilling to award the honor precisely because O'Hara had obstreperously "asked for it."