John O'Hara claimed to be the hardest working author in the United States, and one of his biographers, Matthew J. Bruccoli, believes that "O'Hara published more words than any other major writer of the century." In fact, few--even those who denigrated his achievements as an artist--disputed his status as the most popular serious writer of his time. In O'Hara's prime, the books appeared with metronomic regularity: novels, collections of short stories, collections of plays, collections of essays. Every Thanksgiving of the 1960s saw the publication of an O'Hara book, and five more saw print without the benefit of the pre-Christmas rush to the bookstores. And despite the critics' animadversions about the quality of this burst of creative energy, almost unprecedented among major American authors, O'Hara's work sold extremely well.

The contradiction between John O'Hara 's low critical reputation and his enormous popular success must be analyzed in any...