The only novel by John O'Hara I've read is BUtterfield 8. This was in my pre-blogging days, or at least in the days when I didn't write much about the books I was reading, which is a shame as I'd love to know now exactly what I was thinking when I read it. Inspired by the death of a beautiful woman whose body washed up on a Long Island beach, O'Hara created Gloria Wandrous who lives as much on her beauty as on her intellect. Essentially used and abused her entire life she comes to no good end. I only recall the briefest of details, and am left instead with an impression of a dark story of a sordid and unhappy life without even a glimmer of hope set in Depression era America. He's best known for BUtterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarra, but I decided to bring home Elizabeth Appleton instead.
O'Hara was a prolific writer of what seems to be questionable merit (depending on who you're talking to of course). Apparently he was something of a social climber, had a knack for self-promotion and wrote politically charged (conservative) magazine columns--none of which endeared him to the critics. It all seems to have overshadowed his work. A different view was presented when I was reading about him in Contemporary Literary Criticism.
"There are more elegant stylists, more profound thinkers, more sensitive spirits. There is no working writer who matches O'Hara's importance as a social historian. When the next century wants to know how Americans lived between 1920 and 1940, it will find what it wants to know in O'Hara. It will find the names of things--the right names--but it will also find accurate analyses of the social structure and characters who are both real and representative. The stories and people may not always fall within the individual reader's experience, but it is difficult to doubt that O'Hara's wide knowledge and deep commitment to the truth would permit him to falsify his material." (Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, David Madden).
I have a feeling John O'Hara is one of those authors who is slowly fading into obscurity, with the exception of his two more famous books. Elizabeth Appleton was a later novel, published in 1963. Although not as popular it was well received, and the New York Times called it "for the most part a competent, an interesting, an interesting and even an illuminating narrative." A college setting, conventional and rather stuffy, is where the snobbish Elizabeth Appleton finds herself as the wife of one of the history professors. Elizabeth schemes to make her husband college president though doesn't help his situation by her own extracurricular activities. O'Hara tended to push the boundaries with his novels and this one seems no exception.
I'm very curious about Elizabeth Appleton, but whether it is this one or one of his others, I plan on exploring more of his work. If for no other reason than to see how people lived in the period he was writing, I think he deserves far more attention than he gets.