Quote of the Day (John O'Hara, With Some Early July Social History)

“They dodged being in love at first, and because they always had been friends, his seeing her increasingly more frequently did not become perceptible until he asked her to go with him to the July 3 Assembly [a large society gathering held twice a year in Gibbsville, PA on New Year's Eve and July 3^rd]. You asked a girl at least a month in advance for the Assemblies, and you asked the girl you liked best. It was the only one he ever freely had asked her to; she knew his mother told him to ask her to the very first one. The Assembly was not just another dance, and in the time between her accepting and the night of the dance they both were conscious of it. A girl gave preference in dates to the man who was asking her to the Assembly.” —American novelist and short-story writer John O'Hara (1905-1970), Appointment in Samarra (1934)

When John O’Hara first wrote about the custom of “Assembly” in the early 1930s, it was contemporary. When he titled the first collection of his extraordinary short stories in the 1960s using the word, however, fewer readers would have recognized the reference. That number has surely dwindled in the sixty-plus years since.

In the foreword to his 1960 trio of novellas, Sermons and Soda-Water, O’Hara explained what he felt increasingly compelled to do, particularly for younger readers not familiar with the original context of the times:

“I have lived with as well as in the Twentieth Century from its earliest days. The United States in this Century is what I know, and it is my business to write about it to the best of my ability, with the sometimes special knowledge I have. The Twenties, the Thirties, and the Forties are already history, but I cannot be content to leave their story in the hands of the historians and the editors of picture books. I want to record the way people talked and thought and felt, and do it with complete honesty and variety.”

You can read O’Hara for his extraordinary facility with dialogue, as well as for the insights into characters that he wants you to infer from below the surface of the story.

But, especially in his later work—and even glancingly, here, in Appointment in Samarra—you come away with a better understanding of a particular time and region (what he called his “Pennsylvania Protectorate” of the anthracite coal area in which he grew up).

It is, as he hoped, something you’re unlikely to learn from “historians and the editors of picture books”—or, I might add, other writers of fiction. 

(For a further consideration of why, "Among American novelists, O'Hara remains our best, begrudging social historian," I urge you to read Charles F. McElwee III's fine 2014 essay on the Website of the John O'Hara Society.)