From the Terrace (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: John O’Hara
- First Published: 1958
- Type of Plot: Social chronicle
- Time of Work: The first half of the twentieth century
- Setting: Pennsylvania, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
- Principal Characters: Raymond Alfred Eaton, Samuel Eaton, Martha Johnson Eaton, William Eaton, Sally, Constance Eaton, Victoria Dockwiler, Norma Budd, Alexander Thornton (Lex) Porter, James MacHardie, Creighton Duffy, Tom Rothermel, Mary St. John, Jim Roper, Rowland Eaton, Natalie Benziger, Jack Tom Smith
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Family or family life
- Locales: New York, NY
The Novel
Tightly packed with detail and characters as well as incident, From the Terrace chronicles roughly the first fifty years in the life of Raymond Alfred Eaton, known as Alfred, born during 1897 in the small mill town of Port Johnson, Pennsylvania. Throughout more than eight hundred pages of frequently dense narrative, O’Hara sifts through the various data of Alfred’s life, loves, friendships, and often brilliant career, attempting thus to account for Alfred’s rapid rise in the business world and his even more precipitous fall. When the novel ends, shortly...
[The entire page is 2787 words long]
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