Books by John O'Hara

Richard Hubert ("Hubie") Ward is a wily young actor from the Easternmost world of prep schools and summers on the Cape. By the time he is twenty-five, he has lied, cheated, and seduced his way to the big-time on the Coast. Hollywood prizes Hubie for his air of respectability: "He was not a Latin or a Jew...he was not a booze artist...he was not actorish, he was not pugnacious...he was of the theater, he had been given good notices in an Art picture, he was not confused by an oyster fork, he stood up when ladies entered the room..". But Hubie's blind ambition quickly strips away the guise. He blackmails the man who gave him his first acting job, then spends an amorous afternoon with the wife of a studio head who happens to be his boss. Nothing, it seems, can stop the self-destructive philandering that dogs this shooting star.

O'Hara was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of mid-century society' Wall Street JournalJohn O'Hara remains the great chronicler of American society, and nowhere are his powers more evident than in his portraits of New York's so-called Golden Age.

'O'Hara is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust' The New York TimesWhen the beautiful, imperious and moneyed Grace Caldwell Tate wants something she goes after it, men included.

DOCTOROWJohn O'Hara is widely credited with inventing the New Yorker short story, and remains the most-published short story writer in the history of the magazine. Selected from his vast collection of short fiction written over forty years, these refreshingly frank, sparely written stories show him at his best.

Julian English is part of the social elite of his 1930s American hometown but from the moment he impetuously throws a cocktail in the face of one of his powerful business associates his life begins to spiral out of control - taking his loving but troubled marriage with it. This is a blackly comic depiction of the fall of Julian English.