Appointment in Samarra

Appointment in Samarra is the first novel by the American writer John O'Hara, published in 1934.

Its subject is the self-destruction of Julian English, a wealthy car dealer in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, who has lost none of his standing yet cannot stop behaving as though he wants to. Over three days around Christmas he throws a drink in the face of a man it would be dangerous to offend, begins an affair, and lets his marriage and his business slide out of his hands, while his friends and neighbours watch with the pleasure of people who have always known he would do it. O'Hara wrote the book about the social world he had grown up in and the price of falling out of it, and the title comes from an old story about a servant who meets Death in the market at Baghdad.

O'Hara went on to write many more novels and stories about the same town, and the Modern Library placed this first one among the hundred best English-language novels published in the twentieth century.