America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

So this is a collection of stories from John O’Hara, who wrote many many more than are contained here, and there’s also a weird gap in the middle that I will discuss. For first third of this book, we have very short short stories from about 1935-1950. This represents a period in which John O’Hara was heavily publishing in The New Yorker and in a lot of ways, he kind of invented the genre of the “New Yorker” Story — short, impactful. For me, the kind of story that best exemplifies this one is something like John Updike’s “A&P” — short, wistful with a good solid ending.

So a lot of these stories are like this. The most famous one here, and the only one I had ever heard of was “Pal Joey” the original epistolary story that later became a short novel and then play and film starring Frank Sinatra.

Then there’s a big jump in the middle to much longer stories — some 50-70 pages, but mostly in the 10s and 20s, and these stories represent the last part of O’Hara’s story career.

The stories are very good at communicating white, small town middle-class life in reaction to the slowing down of political and personal upheaval. White middle-class Americans have not ever had a hard time of it, and in the last 100 years or so, there’s been almost no issues until more recently. John O’Hara is sort of at the forefront of narrating that life decades before John Updike, John Cheever, and Richard Yates got around to it.

I know John O’Hara primarily through his novels — Appointment at Samarra, BUtterfield 8, Ten North Frederick, A Rage to Live, and From the Terrace, but these stories really sold me on him beyond those.

(Photo: https://www.amazon.ca/Collected-Stories-John-OHara-Introduction/dp/0394540832)