Story of His Life

The epitaph on John O’Hara’s Princeton gravestone reads: “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional.” Another Irishman, Jay McInerney, picked up the second half—or at least, a decade of it, the 1980s—and a city, New York. “It was a surprise to me when I started being hailed as a spokesman for my generation, as a definer of the zeitgeist,” he says.