Gibbsville, PA: The Classic Stories

Get the library edition if you can-the new version doesn't have all the stories. This is a great, huge collection of short stories by John O'hara. He describes the area of Eastern Pennsylvania especially Pennsylvania Dutch and Coal areas. His characters are amazing and he knows how to tell an interesting story-full of scandal and drama.

I am from O'Hara's Collieryville and can recall English / Literature teachers in high school saying: There's not a John O'Hara among the lot of you! Well, who was/is John O'Hara, why should I care, and if he's so great why aren't we reading his stuff in class? All good questions with very good answers when you get into this collection which contains some first-class 'adult' themes which clearly kept John out of the school library! This is a collection of short stories. One of my favorite genres. Sometimes the story is so short it can end in 17 or even fewer pages and be finished like the slam of a door or leave you wandering down your own 'what if' trails. Continuing some of these to 200+ would be a disservice to storyline and reader alike. This collection is a great look at the Schuylkill County coal region during the period my grandparents grew up in and during the younger days of my parents. The argot is spot on if yiz know wut I mean. The chararcters are human. Perhaps too human at times. The era is just after the Great War and into the Great Depression. It opens with a longish story set during the time of the Spanish Flu pandemic and is just too real at times. I can actually visualize many of the roads travelled, literally, and see the locales under discussion even if many of them were mostly ruins when I was younger. This helps bring alive the stories from many relatives as to what a 'swell place' this used to be to hang out. I'm hooked. I'm looking for more O'Hara and plan to start on this guy called Updike. I advise you to join the reading party if you like true realism in literature from that period. It's better than F. Scott Fitzgerald IMO.

John O'Hara has been and remains one of the great secret treasures of 20th Century American literature. Period. Any reader who would comment "to read one story is to have read them all" would no doubt say the same of Faulkner, Hemingway or Fitzgerald.O'Hara captures not only the voice of rural Pennsylvania circa 1910, but indeed recreates an entire new world based on his experiences in this place and time. As one who has walked the streets of Pottsville, Shamokin and Tamaqua I can assure you that echoes of O'Hara's Gibbsville still resinate throughout the region.Discover O'Hara for yourself.

If John O'Hara isn't one of our greatest American writers, who is? O'Hara, along with writers like John Cheever and Irwin Shaw, chronicle the American suburban experience during the middle part of the twentieth century and we should not miss out on their observations. But what do you see when you go to Barnes & Noble or Borders? Racks and racks of ridiculous drivel hoisted on us by greedy publishers and other fast-buck artists. Mindless entertainment rules while O'Hara, Cheever, Shaw and their like are pushed off the book shelves and out of circulation. The tone and empathy of these Masters will forever provide an insight into our American experience that you won't get from the trash that we now seem to be preoccupied with. OK, OK, OK. I read some of this current trash, too, but I haven't forgotten the great American Triumvirate.... O'Hara, Cheever and Shaw!