[John O'Hara] was concerned mainly with depicting manners and customs in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis, Lardner, and Fitzgerald. (p. 279)

[The stories of Pal Joey, with] their malapropisms, bad grammar and spelling, and slang,… would seem to derive most immediately from Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al. Joey, although perhaps somewhat more sophisticated, possesses much the same quality of egotism, vulgarity, brashness, and naïveté, despite a certain shrewdness in small things, as Lardner's baseball protagonist. If he is not an altogether admirable character, Joey is not contemptible either. (p. 280)

[The stories he wrote in the 1960's, late in his life, are] better, on the whole, than [his] earlier ones. By and large they have more substance, more story quality, more interesting characters, more penetrating social observation, and more significant implications. Like O'Hara himself, many of his characters have grown older, and there is more concern than in the earlier short fiction with rendering thoughts and feelings, particularly those having to do with how a character has lived his life and what he has or has not made of it. These characters, especially when they suffer disappointment, deterioration, or defeat, are often presented so as to evoke our sympathy, but it should also be noted that the number of unsympathetic characters in the later stories is not inconsiderable—vulgarians, scoundrels, degenerates, unfaithful wives, philanderers, and worse are held up to view, though usually with more subtlety and restraint than in the often heavily ironic and sardonic exposés of such persons in the earlier stories. (pp. 281-82)

But O'Hara is probably consistently at his best in the many stories which are primarily character studies…. He made them seem very real, not so much through penetrating deeply into them psychologically as by showing in detail what they say and do in relation to their environments and to the other characters in the story. Often he restricted himself to a minimum of auctorial exposition and description, relying heavily on dialogue instead to tell his story, and he had a very fine ear for the speech of his characters, no matter what their occupation or social station. (p. 282)

The general [critical] indictment against O'Hara contains a number of specific charges: He was a limited writer who was too flatly and literally realistic, too preoccupied with social distinctions and trivial details, and unable to transcend his realism as Hemingway did. He wrote too rapidly and discursively; he ought to have revised and polished more. His stories need more of such elements as humor, emotion, symbolism, imagery, mystery, and often they need more point. They may be vivid and plausible, but they do not have enough truth. There is undoubtedly some basis for these criticisms, but taken altogether they perhaps asked O'Hara to be something he was not…. [O'Hara is praised] more for short stories than for his novels, in recognition that he possessed not inconsiderable talents … as a literary craftsman and social historian. (p. 283)