Creation stood still for this solemn assembly. The Great Meeting to unfold Heaven’s redemption was about to begin. “My People,” Christ The King spoke. “You are about to enter the unfamiliar, a world of hindrances, darkness, oppression and seemingly constant warfare. Some will become lost and disheartened as you habitate this realm with “The...
Hope of Heaven, first published in 1938, is a fast-paced novel by John O’Hara in the “doomed romance” genre. The novel centers on a world-weary Hollywood screenwriter of only limited success in his mid-thirties who is in love with an idealistic young woman in her twenties who is only mildly interested in him. When her father, a private detective, comes to Los Angeles on a case in which the screenwriter has a part, tragedy ensues. John O’Hara (1905-1970) was the author of many novels and short stories and is best known for his first two novels – Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8.
What we now call "the good life" first appeared in California during the 1930s. Motels, home trailers, drive-ins, barbecues, beach life and surfing, sports from polo and tennis and golf to mountain climbing and skiing, "sportswear" (a word coined at the time), and sun suits were all a part of the good life--perhaps California's most distinctive influence of the 1930s. In The Dream Endures, Kevin Starr shows how the good life prospered in California--in pursuits such as film, fiction, leisure, and architecture--and helped to define American culture and society then and for years to come. Starr previously chronicled how Californians absorbed the thousand natural shocks of the Great Depression--unemployment, strikes, Communist agitation, reactionary conspiracies--in Endangered Dreams, the fourth volume of his classic history of California. In The Dream Endures, Starr reveals the other side of the picture, examining the newly important places where the good life flourished, like Los Angeles (where Hollywood lived), Palm Springs (where Hollywood vacationed), San Diego (where the Navy went), the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (where Einstein went and changed his view of the universe), and college towns like Berkeley. We read about the rich urban life of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in newly important communities like Carmel and San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, where, each Thursday afternoon, automobiles packed with Hollywood celebrities would arrive from Southern California for the long weekend at Hearst Castle. The 1930s were the heyday of the Hollywood studios, and Starr brilliantly captures Hollywood films and the society that surrounded the studios. Starr offers an astute discussion of the European refugees who arrived in Hollywood during the period: prominent European film actors and artists and the creative refugees who were drawn to Hollywood and Southern California in these years--Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Man Ray, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel. Starr gives a fascinating account of how many of them attempted to recreate their European world in California and how others, like Samuel Goldwyn, provided stories and dreams for their adopted nation. Starr reserves his greatest attention and most memorable writing for San Francisco. For Starr, despite the city's beauty and commercial importance, San Francisco's most important achievement was the sense of well-being it conferred on its citizens. It was a city that "magically belonged to everyone." Whether discussing photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, "hard-boiled fiction" writers, or the new breed of female star--Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, and the improbable Mae West--The Dream Endures is a brilliant social and cultural history--in many ways the most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books.
The writer John O'Hara (1905-1970) came from Pottsville in Pennsylvania. He put his home town and the surrounding vicinity under a microscope to produce an account of 'The Anthracite Region' that rivals Edith Wharton's descriptions of New York and Sinclair Lewis's anatomy of Sauk Centre. With the discerning eye of a local resident, O'Hara recreated this coal-rich region and its people so well that his novelettes, novellas, novels, plays and short stories give a true record of his 'Pennsylvania Protectorate' in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. In order to reveal the ethnographical, geographical and historical authenticity of the O'Hara Canon, this book examines his writings in the context of Pottsville and the borough of Tamaqua, as well as the nearby towns and villages. The author also investigates both O'Hara's genteel upbringing and his gangster stratum. The book explores the many dimensions of O'Hara's life from the time of his birth until his escape to New York City in 1928. New sources such as unpublished letters and interviews with O'Hara's family, friends and enemies provide important insights into O'Hara, as well as into Pottsville and the surrounding region.
Examines how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds.
Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde documents the collaborations and conflicts essential to the history of the post-war avant-garde. It offers a study of composer Morton Feldman's associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Moorman, and others. Arguing that friendship and mourning sustained the collective aesthetics of the New York School, Dohoney has written an emotional and intimate revision of New York modernism from the point of view of Feldman's agonistic community.
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man of letters demonstrates Wilson's supreme skills as both literary and cultural critic.
The story is about a high school graduate named Hara, who attended college at TSU, a college in San Marcos, Texas, where she reunites with her ex-boyfriend named Bishop Summers but at the same time becomes friends with a fellow student named Stephen. Stephen becomes obsessed over her and sets up a plot with one of Hara's roommates to break her and Bishop up. When the plot doesn't go as planned, he kidnaps Hara and keeps her tied up in his barn for three weeks. Within those three weeks, he makes her quit TSU, turns her back to her friends and family, including Bishop. Also within those three weeks he beats and rapes her. Her mom hires a private investigator to find Hara. Once he finds Hara, her mom, the private investigator, and Bishop team up to rescue Hara, but the plan to rescue Hara will become a difficult task because Stephen has killed someone before and to keep Hara, he would do so again. Youtube: http: //youtu.be/F-Ybl-Ac3A8
