“John O’Hara’s fiction,” wrote Lionel Trilling, “is preeminent for its social verisimilitude.” Made famous by his bestselling novels, including <i>BUtterfield 8</i> and <i>Appointment in Samarra</i>, O’Hara (1905–1970) also wrote some of the finest short fiction of the twentieth century.<br><br>First published by the Modern Library in 1956, <i>Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara</i> displays the author’s skills as a keen social observer, a refreshingly frank storyteller, and a writer with a brilliant ear for dialogue. “The stories in this volume,” writes Louis Begley in his new Introduction, “show the wide range of [O’Hara’s] interests and an ability to treat with a virtuoso’s ease characters and situations from any place on America’s geographic and social spectrum.”