Balzac of the Fishbowl

John O’Hara’s novels and stories are one of those fashions, like wing collars or Bermuda shorts, that never quite come around again. Prominent between roughly World War II and the Great Society, O’Hara’s enormous output of fiction, which literary critics never really liked, almost immediately sank into obscurity. Every few decades, one of O’Hara’s admirers, usually a literary miner of the same sociological vein, tries to revive the writer’s reputation with biographies, glossy new editions, or appreciative essays. None of these efforts has succeeded. O’Hara’s name usually draws a blank among even well-read people younger than 60 or so.