We feel mildly guilty at borrowing items from Thames and Hudson's excellent "Book of Days for the Literary Year," but we couldn't pass up its list of notable events for January 31, including the first performance of Chekhov's "Three Sisters" in 1904 and the publication in 1948 of J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect day for Banana Fish."
This was also the birthday, in 1915, of Thomas Merton, author of "The Seven Storey Mountain," and in 1923 of Norman Mailer, who, fifty years later, threw a party for himself at Four Seasons in New York and invited 5,000 people. Five hundred showed up.
And January 31, 1905, was the birthdate of John O'Hara, the remarkably prolific writer of an endless stream of some of the century's best stories and novellas.
Why Jim? Because it seems to us that Jim Malloy, the reporter turned screenwriter in O'Hara's great "Hope of Heaven" is probably a mirror image of the author.
But what do we know?
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