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Start giftingBUtterfield 8
Summary
The bestselling novel that became an Oscar-winning film starring Elizabeth Taylor about New York's speakeasy generation
A masterpiece of American fiction and a bestseller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 lays bare with brash honesty the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. One Sunday morning, Gloria wakes up in a stranger's apartment with nothing but a torn evening dress, stockings, and panties. When she steals a fur coat from the wardrobe to wear home, she unleashes a series of events that can only end in tragedy. Inspired by true events, this novel caused a sensation on its publication for its frank depiction of the relationship between a wild and beautiful young woman and a respectable, married man.
Reviews
“A man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well.” —Ernest Hemingway“Like Henry James, O’Hara could create a world where class and social structures are all-important but not openly discussed.” —The Village Voice
“O’Hara understood better than any other American writer how class can both reveal and shape character.... [His] genius was in his unerring precision in capturing the speech and the milieus of his characters, whether the setting was Pennsylvania, Hollywood, or New York.” —Fran Lebowitz
"O'Hara occupies a unique position in our contemporary literature... He is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust." —Lionel Trilling, The New York Times
“An author I love is John O’Hara. . . . I think he’s been forgotten by time, but for dialogue lovers, he’s a goldmine of inspiration.” —Douglas Coupland, Shelf Awareness
“One of the great novels of New York in the Depression . . . [O’Hara’s] novels of the mid-thirties are his classics, and they deserve to be much more famous than they are.” —Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, from the Introduction
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