John Henry O'Hara was an Irish American writer. He earned a reputation first for short stories and became a best-selling novelist by the age of thirty with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. He was particularly known for an unparalleled and shockingly accurate ear for dialogue. O'Hara was a keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently about the socially ambitious. O'Hara had a reputation for personal irascibility and for cataloging social ephemera, both of which sometimes overshadowed his gifts as a storyteller. Writer Fran Lebowitz called him "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald. " John Updike, one of his consistent supporters, grouped him with Chekhov in a C-SPAN interview. By contrast, Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times dismissed him as a "minor writer" and a "well-known lout. "

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