American author John O'Hara had been writing a novel, with the working title "The Infernal Grove." Then his friend, the wise-cracking author Dorothy Parker, shared with him an ancient Mesopotamian story, as told by the British novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham:

    One day, a servant in Baghdad saw Death in the marketplace, and Death (in the guise of a woman) seemed to make a threatening gesture. Frightened, the servant stole his master's horse, and fled as quickly as possible to Samarra, 75 miles away, hoping to escape Death--and there she was in that marketplace! Asking why she had threatened him, he is told: "That was not a threat. That was surprise, for I knew I had an appointment to see you here in Samarra tonight!"

    Seeing that the story perfectly epitomized his plot--involving the inevitability of the suicide of the main character Julian English--O'Hara changed his title to "Appointment in Samarra." He later wrote, "Dorothy didn't like the title, [O'Hara's publisher] Alfred Harcourt didn't like the title, his [Harcourt's] editors didn't like it, nobody liked it but me."

    This Julian, just shy of 30 years old, spends a three-day period around Christmas in the 1930s getting more and more entangled in bad decisions and just bad luck.

    Any of the problems Julian has--public fights, a slow-down in business, fears of losing his wife--could be remedied, but after fantasizing suicide in various ways (once with a gun), the automobile dealer runs his car in a closed garage and kills himself with carbon monoxide.

    Like Julian English, John O'Hara spent much of his life feeling underappreciated. He thought he should have had a Nobel Prize, and been given honorary degrees. None of this happened. Still, he was highly praised by other writers of his time, and he even reached out from beyond the grave to argue for his superiority. The epitaph he wrote for his own tombstone read: "Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well."

    Vocabulary: Which word above means:

    1. making lots of jokes

    2. the chemical written CO

    3. summed up, represented succinctly

    4. daydreaming

    5. appearance, style

    6. related to Hell

    7. wrapped up, trapped by

    8. given due to respect, not because it's earned

    9. brief words written or spoken about someone who dies

    10. necessity, inability to be avoided

    ANSWERS: 1. wise-cracking 2. carbon monoxide 3. epitomized 4. fantasizing 5. guise 6. infernal 7. entangled (in) 8. honorary 9. epitaph 10. inevitability