This new edition of John O'Hara's greatest accomplishment -- his critically acclaimed Gibbsville stories, more than forty of them -- brings piercingly to life in all its social and sexual complexity what O'Hara called his "Pennsylvania Protectorate" (in reality, the coal region of his hometown, Pottsville, in Schuylkill County). Here are classics like "The Doctor's Son," "Imagine Kissing Pete," "Fatimas and Kisses," "The Cellar Domain," and "The Bucket of Blood." Here are the country club set, the miners in company towns, the shop-keepers, bartenders, barbers, collegians, doctors, and lawyers, who people a world as varied, vibrant, and complete as Faulkner's Yoknapatawphna County or Thomas Wolfe's Altamount. Here are four decades of the best work by one of America's most underrated writers -- "a formal innovator" who, says Charles McGrath of the New York Times Book Review, crafted the kind of story that "Hemingway typically gets credit for" and that "paved the way for Salinger, Cheever, Updike and even Carter." Book jacket.