John O'Hara, Sermons and Soda-Water

Steven Goldleaf (Pace University)

Ed. by Stephen E. Meats, Pittsburg State University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1960

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Story Collection

Resources

The narrator of all three intertwined novellas in this collection is a middle-aged writer named James Malloy, who narrates much of John O'Hara's most intensely personal fiction and who is plainly O'Hara's fictional alter-ego. Originally appearing in “The Doctor's Son”, an all-but-explicitly autobiographical short story written in the early 1930s, Malloy recurred in O'Hara's first three novels as a minor character, a major character, or as the narrator, but disappeared entirely from O'Hara's work for over a decade beginning in 1949, when he broke with the New Yorker magazine, his main publishing market, over a lukewarm review of a novel. Throughout the 1950s, O'Hara, whose reputation as the inventor of the archetypal …

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1355 words

Citation: Goldleaf, Steven. "Sermons and Soda-Water". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 November 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2135, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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