Missing, wanted: the O’Hara files

John O’Hara, who needled the upper middle class in such novels as “Butterfield 8” and “Pal Joey,” began his writing career as a journalist in Pottsville, Pa., the coal town where he grew up in the early 1900s and which provided the setting for much of his later fiction.

But the articles he wrote as a general assignment reporter for the Pottsville Journal are missing -- and have been since the paper folded in the early 1950s and its archives were transferred to the local historical society.

Now, a leading O’Hara scholar, Matthew J. Bruccoli, is offering a $1,000 reward in hopes that somebody will come forward with the missing newspaper volumes -- which span the years 1924 to 1926 -- and let him put them on microfilm.

Bruccoli, 73, who edited “Gibbsville, Pa.,” an anthology of O’Hara’s classic short stories, and wrote a 1975 biography about the author, tried the same thing a decade ago. No one came forward.