So why is it that my sympathy — indeed a feeling of full-hearted fraternity — is drawn to the ridiculous yob with the big, boozy face?" The trouble with such generously bestowed fraternity is that O'Hara wasn't only, or even primarily, a ridiculous yob; he was a sensitive and productive literary artist, with some alcohol and anger problems.
His lucid and sensitive literary criticism was published in various periodicals.
While a German volume appeared in 1933, this elegant, block-bound Penguin edition is the first English version of these tales, in a delightfully unstuffy translation by Malcolm C Lyons and with a sensitive introduction to their cultural and literary context by the Arabist Robert Irwin.
The need for all fiction to have strong and pacy plots and bold action seems to be growing and the idea that a plot-driven story can also be literary, sensitive and intellectual is gaining ground.
In turn, these readers' offspring, a generation of "literary, sensitive and sophisticated young people," as Alfred Kazin put it, saw themselves in the precocious Glass siblings — until, as parents, they helped to decide the moment when paying attention to children shifted to pushing them to achieve.
He is sensitive, intelligent, literary, outwardly and inwardly curious, tender, sometimes boorish and spiteful but conscious of fair play, wickedly discerning and funny, surprisingly modest, wildly generous, a delightful gossip, and virtually never boring — something that would have frightened and appalled him.
The Bronx certainly produced its share of artistic and literary figures, but it wasn't always an easy place in which to be a sensitive, creative soul.
It's a sensitive, very literary study of the nature of obsession, centring on an eccentric, low-life autodidact in Florida called John Laroche Chris Cooperr), who has gone from one obsession to another, the latest being orchids.
He was a political and literary genius.
