Gibbsville, PA: The Classic Stories

John O’Hara’s greatest accomplishment is available in a handsome newly revised one-volume edition. The famous Gibbsville stories, more than fifty of them—include such stunners as “The Doctor’s Son,” “Imagine Kissing Pete,” “Fatimas and Kisses,” “The Cellar Domain,” and “The Bucket of Blood.” Again, O’Hara’s Pennsylvania Protectorate, as he called it—in reality, the coal region of his hometown, Pottsville, in Schuylkill County—comes to socially and sexually complicated life. Here are the miners in the company towns, the country club set, the shopkeepers, the bartenders, the barbers, and the collegians. It is a world as varied, vibrant, and complete as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawphna County or Thomas Wolfe’s Altamount. Presented in this Book-of-the-Month Club Selection are four decades of the best work by the author who Bennett Cerf declared one of America’s most underrated writers.