John Updike grouped him with Anton Chekhov in a C-Span interview. Fran Leibowitz called him "the real Scott Fitzgerald.".
Won a National Book Award in 1956 for his novel "Ten North Frederick."
Was at one time the film critic for "Newsweek" magazine.
Is buried in Princeton Cemetery, Princeton, New Jersey. The epitaph on his gravestone reads, "Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional.".
He congratulated his friend John Steinbeck when Steinbeck was named the Nobel laureate for literature in 1962, but O'Hara resentfully believed that he should have won the award. He subsequently complained that Steinbeck had won "his" Nobel Prize.
Robert Benchley wrote that he was having lunch at a restaurant when John O'Hara came in. Benchley called O'Hara over and said he had just seen Pal Joey for the second time and found it even better the second time. O'Hara glumly asked "What was wrong with it the first time?".