Q&A …

… John O’Hara in the 1930s: “he habitually told Americans the truth about themselves” | Library of America. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What O’Hara did was recognize that those broad groupings could be broken down further into sub-groups and sub-sub-groups and finally individuals, noting each individual’s background and influences and personality type that added up to an explanation of the ways they spoke, wrote, and thought. He was merciless in recognizing the large role that someone’s past retained into his present, and rather than excuse a verbal slip into a slightly different speech-register as an aberration, he would seize upon it as a revealing clue to that person’s underlying nature. He jokingly described himself as “Dr. O’Hara” and his writing room as his “laboratory” where he conducted “experiments,” but he wasn’t entirely joking—he truly felt that his work was to perceive verbal mannerisms that got straight to the root of each character’s true nature.