The title is a reference to W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of an ancient Mesopotamian tale[2] which appears as an epigraph for the novel:There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.

I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.In his foreword to the 1952 reprint,[citation needed] O'Hara says that the working title for the novel was The Infernal Grove.

He got the idea for the title Appointment in Samarra when Dorothy Parker showed him the story in Maugham's play, Sheppey.

The novel describes how, over the course of three days, Julian English destroys himself with a series of impulsive acts, culminating in suicide.

He is college educated, owns a well-established Cadillac dealership, and within the Gibbsville community belongs to the prestigious "Lantenengo Street crowd".

Yet within three days, he sexually propositions two women, succeeding once, with an ease and confidence suggesting this is well-practiced behavior.

As Julian is driven home, pretending to be asleep, he "felt the tremendous excitement, the great thrilling lump in the chest and abdomen that comes before the administering of an unknown, well-deserved punishment.

Third, the next day, during lunch at the Lantenengo Club, Julian engages in a complicated brawl with a one-armed war veteran named Froggy Ogden, who is also Caroline's cousin.

And immediately began the worst fear he had ever known that this day, this week, this minute, next year, sometime she would open herself to another man and close herself around him.

He believes that, as a result of his behavior and of the community's sympathy for Caroline, "no girl in Gibbsville—worth having—would risk the loss of reputation which would be her punishment for getting herself identified with him."

Listen, you, leave my sister alone.After this and other indications that he had mis-gauged his social status, he commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, running his car in a closed garage.

O'Hara biographer Frank MacShane writes "The excessiveness of Julian's suicide is what makes Appointment in Samarra so much a part of its time.

Biographer Geoffrey Wolff quotes a Saturday Review article by Yale University professor Henry Seidel Canby, entitled "Mr. O'Hara and the Vulgar School", and also cites Sinclair Lewis's denunciation of the book's sensuality as "nothing but infantilism – the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn."

However, passages like the following were quite unusual for the time: She was wearing a dress that was cut in front so he could all but see her belly-button, but the material, the satin or whatever it was, it held close to her body so that when she stood up she only showed about a third of each breast.