There hasn’t been much scholarship on John O’Hara, for largely incomprehensible reasons other than personal antipathy or a prejudice against clear English prose that doesn’t require much parsing, but there has been some, starting with the most inclusive and judicious biography, Matthew J. Bruccoli’s The O’Hara Concern (New York: Random House, 1975). Bruccoli also compiled a detailed bibliography of O’Hara’s publications, John O’Hara: A Checklist (New York: Random House, 1972), which contains a speech O’Hara gave late in his career. Of the other biographies, Finis Farr’s O’Hara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973) has the dubious advantage of being the first written, as well as the only one written by an acquaintance of O’Hara’s. Frank MacShane’s The Life of John O’Hara (New York: Dutton, 1980) is perfectly serviceable if slightly less inclusive than Bruccoli’s. Geoffrey Wolff’s The Art of Burning Bridges (New York: Knopf, 2003) is not quite a biography of O’Hara, and not completely satisfactory as an extended literary essay or as an autobiographical essay, either. It is a strange book.
Of the shorter criticism, Phillip Eppard collected some essays in his Critical Essays on John O’Hara (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), which seems more insightful and various than some previous pamphlet-length attempts at criticism by such authors as Russell E. Carson, Sheldon Norman Grebstein, Robert Emmet Long, and Charles C. Walcutt, who have studied mainly O’Hara’s novels. My own John O’Hara: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1999) contains a number of essays on O’Hara’s stories, which Eppard didn’t include (or couldn’t have included), and also a long essay on the stories in which I attempt to chart O’Hara’s story-writing career, more or less systematically.
Although copies of the John O’Hara Journal, published from 1979 to 1983, are all but impossible to come by, there is a website—oharasociety.blogspot.com—sponsored by the John O’Hara Society, a small group of non-academic O’Hara fans who meet on the Internet (and occasionally in New York City, Princeton, or Philadelphia) to discuss the man, his books, his career, and related matters. Those interested in reading O’Hara’s short nonfiction (he wrote columns in various newspapers and magazines from time to time) can find them collected in Sweet and Sour (New York: Random House, 1954) and My Turn (New York: Random House, 1966), while his critical work on writers and writing has been collected by Bruccoli in An Artist Is His Own Fault (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977). Like the prefaces to the short story collections, these collections contain O’Hara’s literary views at their most acerbic, and the Selected Letters of John O’Hara (New York: Random House, 1978), edited also by Bruccoli, contains insights into the composition and themes of many of O’Hara’s stories.
But mostly, for the dedicated reader of the short fiction, there are the stories themselves. O’Hara published more than four hundred of them; reading them all is a satisfying goal for any O’Hara completionist.