A NATURAL WRITER.(The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara)(Book Review)

What has moved Geoffrey Wolff, the author of six novels and two previous biographies, to write "The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara" (Knopf; $30)? Though O'Hara while he was alive felt, for all the fame and wealth his writings earned him, relatively slighted by critics and prize-givers, he became in the decade after his death, in 1970, the subject of three separate biographies: "O'Hara," by his friend Finis Farr (1973); "The O'Hara Concern," a "laborious excavation" (in Wolff's phrase) by that tireless excavator of twentieth-century American literary leavings Matthew J. Bruccoli (1975); and Frank MacShane's efficient, judicious "Life of John O'Hara" (1980). ...