A Rage to Live (Modern Library) - Softcover

O'Hara, John; Begley, Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812971353 ISBN 13: 9780812971354

Publisher: Modern Library Inc, 2004

Synopsis

A momentous bestseller when it was first published in 1949, John O’Hara’s sprawling novel A Rage to Live offers up a gorgeous pageant of idealists and libertines, tradesmen and crusaders, men of violence and goodwill, and women of fierce strength and tenderness. These memorable characters and their vital stories add up to a large-scale social chronicle of America, in what is perhaps the most ambitious work of O’Hara’s career.

“The range of O’Hara’s knowledge of how Americans live was incomparably greater than that of any other ?ction writer of his time,” judged The New Yorker. “One would have to go back to Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser to ?nd a novelist who had even the intention of acquiring knowledge on the scale that O’Hara acquired it.”

About this title

Review:

"A man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvellously well" (Ernest Hemingway)

"O'Hara occupies a unique position...He 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" (Lionel Trilling New York Times)

"O'Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character" (Fran Lebowitz)

"A fascinating character study by one of America's most underrated storytellers, but there are other rewards as well. O'Hara's dialogue is unerringly authentic and his narrative passages as graphic as a photograph" (Los Angeles Times)

"His ear for dialogue is legendary, and he evoked New York cabbies, Hollywood producers and cheap hoods like Pal Joey as easily as he did Park Avenue socialites... Few authors today write convincingly of matters involving public life and private morality - they tend to do one or the other. But O'Hara could intertwine them in a five-page sketch or an 800-page epic." (Washington Post)

Book Description:

Epic good yarn of an adulteress and her fall

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library Inc
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0812971353
• ISBN 13: 9780812971354
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576