The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara - Hardcover

Wolff, Geoffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679427716 ISBN 13: 9780679427711

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2003

Synopsis

Traces the enigmatic twentieth-century writer's childhood in a Pennsylvania coal mining town, early working days, combative relationship with The New Yorker over four decades, and literary accomplishments in the shadow of his contemporaries. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Geoffrey Wolff is the acclaimed author of three works of nonfiction–Black Sun, a biography; The Duke of Deception, a memoir; and A Day at the Beach, a collection of personal essays–as well as six novels, most recently The Age of Consent. In 1994 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Wolff is the director of the graduate fiction program at the University of California, Irvine.

From the Inside Flap:

An enigma of twentieth-century literature–a writer accorded great importance in his time, if less than in his own mind–is here explored by one of our most versatile men of letters, a novelist and biographer ideally suited to the strange case of John O'Hara.

The accomplishments are undeniable: "the Region," the fictionalized coal-mining Pennsylvania of O'Hara's youth, serving his work much as Yoknapatawpha County did Faulkner's; an acute vernacular gift and a narrative frankness shocking in his day; an intimate, combative relationship with The New Yorker for over four decades; and a handful of books, from Appointment in Samarra to Sermons and Soda Water, that justify their author's ambitious claims. Moreover, he cut a wide swath through a Manhattan demimonde whose fierce friendships and bitter feuds–fueled by oceans of booze–were played out at such institutions as the Stork Club, “21,” and the Algonquin Round Table. But for all his best-sellers–one of which, Pal Joey, was a hit on Broadway, adapted by Rodgers and Hart–O’Hara had emerged in the wake of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whose reputations buffeted his own. His preoccupations as a novelist of manners became dated as the world of speakeasies, the Social Register, Ivy League universities, and august clubs was inevitably undermined, while his prickly, status-obsessed outsider's personality failed to engage (and often enraged) changing fashions.

What Geoffrey Wolff reveals is not only the hugely complicated man in full but also his rightful place in our contemporary attention–a portrait of the artist that illuminates both the process of fiction and an era still vivid in our cultural history.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0679427716
• ISBN 13: 9780679427711
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 373