John O’Hara was wont to complain publicly about the state of his reputation, thereby joining the majority of writers, most of whom keep this standard complaint to themselves. What, exactly, apart from being insufficiently grand to please him, was his reputation?

I should say it was—and remains today—that of a writer a substantial notch below Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, about all of whom he spoke and wrote reverently. Five or so years younger than these three novelists, O’Hara labored in their long shadows. He had the additional problem of being thought stronger as a writer of short stories than of novels, though he wrote no fewer than 17 novels. He is credited as a master of dialogue, a practitioner if not the progenitor of the New Yorker story, a never-less-than-interesting commentator on American manners.