A momentous bestseller when it was first published in 1949, John O'Hara's sprawling novel A Rage to Live offers up a gorgeous pageant of idealists and libertines, tradesmen and crusaders, men of violence and goodwill, and women of fierce strength and tenderness. These memorable characters and their vital stories add up to a large-scale social chronicle of America, in what is perhaps the most ambitious work of O'Hara's career.

"The range of O'Hara's knowledge of how Americans live was incomparably greater than that of any other ?ction writer of his time," judged The New Yorker. "One would have to go back to Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser to ?nd a novelist who had even the intention of acquiring knowledge on the scale that O'Hara acquired it."