John O'Hara papers

John Henry O’Hara was an American writer born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania on January 31, 1905. He was the son of Patrick Henry O’Hara, a surgeon, and Katharine Elizabeth Delaney and was the oldest of eight children. O’Hara attended the Fordham Preparatory School, the Keystone State Normal School, and the Niagara Preparatory School but was dismissed from all three. His desire to attend Yale remained unrealized due to his father’s death in 1925, after which O’Hara worked at a variety of jobs that led to journalism and, finally, a career as a writer of novels and short stories. His places of residence included New York, Hollywood, Long Island, and finally Princeton, New Jersey, where he died on April 11, 1970.

O’Hara had a short story first published in the New Yorker in 1928, but it was his 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra that was his first success. With individual short stories continuing to appear in popular periodicals, he published collections and novels such as The Doctor’s Son and Other Stories, Butterfield 8, and Pal Joey. Although critical response was and remains mixed, O’Hara’s work generally met with commercial success, and some of his efforts were adapted for the stage and screen.

O’Hara married three times, first in 1931 to Helen Ritchie Petit, which ended in divorce in 1933; then in 1937 to Belle Mulford Wylie, with whom he had one child before she passed away in 1954; and finally in 1955 to Katharine Barnes Bryan, who survived him.