"O’Hara may not have been the best story writer of the twentieth century, but he is the most addictive," wrote Lorin Stein, then editor-in-chief of The Paris Review, in a 2013 appreciation of O'Hara's work.

These best sellers included A Rage to Live (1949), Ten North Frederick (1955), From the Terrace (1959), Ourselves to Know (1960), Sermons and Soda Water (1960) and Elizabeth Appleton (1963).

Despite the popularity of these books, O'Hara accumulated detractors due to his outsized and easily bruised ego, alcoholic irascibility, long-held resentments and politically conservative views that were unfashionable in literary circles in the 1960s.

Though his family lived among the gentry of eastern Pennsylvania during his childhood, O'Hara's Irish Catholic background gave him the perspective of an outsider to elite WASP society, a theme he wrote of again and again.

[8] His father died about that time, leaving him unable to afford Yale, the college of his dreams, and he fell overnight from the privileged life of a well-heeled doctor's family, including club memberships, riding and dance lessons, fancy cars in the barn, and domestic servants in the house.

"[10] O'Hara followed Samarra with BUtterfield 8, his roman à clef based upon the tragic, short life of flapper Starr Faithfull, whose mysterious death in 1931 became a tabloid sensation.

After the war, he wrote screenplays and more novels, including Ten North Frederick, for which he won the 1956 National Book Award[11] and From the Terrace (1958), which he considered his "greatest achievement as a novelist.

"Between 1960 and 1968," Higgins noted, O'Hara "published six novels, seven collections of short fiction, and some 137 terse and extended stories that all by themselves would supply credentials for a towering reputation in the world of perfect justice that he never did quite find.

"[12] Many of O'Hara's stories (and his later novels written in the 1950s) are set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a barely fictionalized version of his home town of Pottsville, a small city in the anthracite region of the northeastern United States.

Some of the harsh literary criticism is attributed to personal dislike of O'Hara's abrasive ego and arrogant manner, his vigorous self-promotion, his obsession with his social status, and the politically conservative columns he wrote late in his career.

"[16] O'Hara's most biting critics regard his novels as shallow and overly concerned with sexual desire, drinking and surface details at the expense of deeper meaning.

Literary critics called Gill's review a "savage attack" and a "cruel hatchet job" on one of The New Yorker's most popular writers.

"[22] O'Hara's work has many literary admirers, including authors such as Joan Didion, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Fran Lebowitz and Shelby Foote.

In 1957, Pal Joey was made into a musical film starring Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Barbara Nichols.

The film starred Paul Newman as disenchanted Alfred Eaton, son of a wealthy but indifferent father and alcoholic mother as well as Joanne Woodward as his socially ambitious, self-pitying and unfaithful wife Mary St. John.

Gary Cooper starred as Joe Chapin, with Diane Varsi, Ray Stricklyn, Suzy Parker, and Geraldine Fitzgerald in supporting roles.

"[26] A Rage to Live is a 1965 film directed by Walter Grauman and starring Suzanne Pleshette as Grace Caldwell Tate, a well-mannered, upper-crust beauty whose passions wreak havoc on her social circle.

In 1987, an adaptation of O'Hara's 1966 story "Natica Jackson," about a film actress in 1930s Hollywood, was produced for the PBS anthology series Great Performances.

The television period drama series Mad Men, on AMC from 2007 to 2015, generated renewed popular interest in O'Hara's work, which dealt with similar themes of mid-20th century American society.

Biographer Geoffrey Woolf says these earlier columns anticipated "his disastrous 'My Turn' in Newsday, which endured fifty-three weeks ... beginning in late 1964... of his dismissive and contemptuous worst".

His third column nominally supported the Republican Party nominee Barry Goldwater for U.S. president by identifying his cause with fans of the corny accordionist and band leader Lawrence Welk.

The syndicated column was not a success, published by a continuously decreasing number of newspapers, and did not endear him to the politically liberal New York literary establishment.

The May 8, 1965, column takes as its ostensible topic the fact that Yale owns stock in American Broadcasting Company and thus is a beneficiary of the television program Peyton Place.

O'Hara writes: [I]n that Yale Blue Heaven Up Above, where William Lyon Phelps and Henry Seidel Canby may meet every afternoon for tea, there must be some embarrassment.

(The Farmers Hotel, The Searching Sun, The Champagne Pool, Veronique, The Way It Was) (The Man Who Could Not Lose [screen treatment] and Far from Heaven [play]) BUtterfield 8, Pal Joey and The Doctor's Son and Other Stories were published as Armed Services Editions during WWII.