The Art of Burning Bridges (Magill’s Literary Annual 2004)
At a glance:
- Author: Geoffrey Wolff
- First Published: 2003
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1905-1970
- Setting: Pottsville, Pennsylvania; New York; and Princeton, New Jersey
- Principal Characters: John O’Hara, Belle O’Hara, Harold Ross, Woolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, Katharine Barnes (“Sister”) O’Hara
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: New York, Class conflict, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, New York City, Literature, Class consciousness, Pennsylvania, Alcoholism or alcoholics, Substance abuse, Novelists, New Jersey, Drinking or drunkenness, Hollywood
- Locales: New York, Pennsylvania, Princeton, NJ
John O’Hara’s life reads like the template for the twentieth century American writer, at least the male version. Like his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, O’Hara was an alcoholic who made as many enemies as he did friends and who had combative relationships with most editors and scores of other writers. He was also, however, a writer who, in hundreds of New Yorker stories, documented American behavior and mores as well as anyone of his period and a novelist of manners who left a remarkable record of the moral conditions of the...
[The entire page is 1879 words long]
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