<P> After this and other indications that he had misgauged his social status, he commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, running his car in a closed garage . </P> <P> O'Hara biographer Frank MacShane writes "The excessiveness of Julian's suicide is what makes Appointment in Samarra so much a part of its time . Julian doesn't belong to Fitzgerald's Jazz Age; he is ten years younger and belongs to what came to be called the hangover generation, the young people who grew up accustomed to the good life without having to earn it . This is the generation that had so little to defend itself with when the depression came in 1929 ." </P> <P> O'Hara's books tended to push the limits of what was considered tolerable in a mainstream novel . His second, BUtterfield 8, was notorious and was banned from importation into Australia until 1963 . But Appointment In Samarra was controversial too . Biographer Geoffrey Wolff quotes a Saturday Review article by Yale University professor Henry Seidel Canby, entitled "Mr. O'Hara and the Vulgar School," and also cites Sinclair Lewis's denunciation of the book's sensuality as "nothing but infantilism--the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn ." </P> <P> Most of O'Hara's descriptions of sexuality are indirect: "There was the time Elinor Holloway...shinnied half way up the flagpole while five young gentlemen, standing at the foot of the pole, verified the suspicion that Elinor, who had not always lived in Gibbsville, was not naturally, or at least not entirely, a blonde ." However, passages like the following were quite unusual for the time: </P>

Short summary of because i couldn't stop for death