This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Every month we ask a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

Today we'll hear a John O'Hara story from 1943 called Graven Image.

They keep track of things like that?

Certainly said the under-secretary.

I know every goddamn club in this country

I had ample time to study them all then you recall objectively from the outside.

Graven Image was selected by EL Doctoro,

whose most recent book of fiction is The March.

It's a novel about Sherman's March through the South during the Civil War.

Doctoro has been publishing short stories in the New Yorker since 1997.

Edgar, John O'Hara was very successful in his day

but he hasn't really become a household name like his contemporaries Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Faulkner.

Why do you think he's somewhat fallen out of fashion?

Sure, he had an interesting career.

He was well known as the short story writer

and then drifted into writing a very popular best-selling novels.

I'm not sure they were his best work.

He seemed to shine in the short story form, the novella form.

It's always hard to tell why someone who apparently deserves rewards doesn't get them.

There was a gap of about 11 years from 1949 to 1960

...