"Selected Letters of John O'Hara" … cannot but sweeten the reputation of a notoriously irascible and hypersensitive author. (p. 200)

These letters, even when they scold and complain, turn outward, toward the social envelope. Though he strikes an egotistical pose, it is hard to think of another significant twentieth-century fiction writer who was less of an egoist, less of an autobiographical self-celebrator. His interest in other people and their lives is so unfeignedly keen that anything about them, any window-glimpse into their psychologies and social predicaments, will serve him for a story. The action in his stories is often surprisingly slight; he considerately refuses to manipulate characters beyond what their systems will naturally stand. (p. 204)

O'Hara's ability and willingness to portray women has not been often enough complimented. Compared to the women of his fiction, Hemingway's are mere dolls. Indeed, if there is an American male author who has set a greater variety of believable women on the page, or as effortlessly projected himself into a female point of view, I haven't read him. Their disadvantaged position and the strength of the strategies with which they seek advantages are comprehended without doctrine, and without a loss of heterosexual warmth. (p. 213)

Humanity in all its divisions was present to him; his gifts of curiosity and empathy were so strong that one must ask what, if anything, his art lacked. Love of language might be an answer—language as a semi-opaque medium whose colors and connotations can be worked into a supernatural, supermimetic bliss…. Tuned to less than highest pitch, his prose and dialogue just run on…. But the interest of the human life in his mind's eye was so self-evident to him he saw no need to make it interesting. A thing was itself, and rarely reminded him of another. He is resolutely un-metaphorical, and language seldom led him with its own music deeper into the matter at hand. Hemingway's flatness had about it a willed point, a philosophical denial of depth; O'Hara's was serenely post-philosophical. His best short stories have a terrific delicacy, and the calm compositional weirdness of a Degas or an Oriental print…. O'Hara was crazy about writing, and his writing has the innocence of enthusiasm…. What innovations his art contains—including his once scandalous sexual frankness—were forced upon him, one feels, by his reverence before the facts of life. (pp. 213-14)