''Hope of Heaven'' is a 1938 novel by

John O'Hara John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent ''The New Yorker'' magazine short story style.John O'Hara: Stories, Charles McGrath, ed., The L ...

. It tells the story of struggling screenwriter in his mid-30s, living in

Hollywood Hollywood usually refers to: * Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California * Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States Hollywood may also refer to: Places United States * Hollywood District (disambiguation) * Hollywood, ...

, who becomes besotted with an idealistic, younger woman, who doesn't fully reciprocate. Her estranged father, in town on business, complicates matters. The book is considered a work of

hard-boiled Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective fiction and noir fiction). The genre's typical protagonist is a detective who battles the violence o ...

noir. The screenwriter in the story is John Malloy, O'Hara's frequent fictional

alter ego An alter ego (Latin for "other I", " doppelgänger") means an alternate self, which is believed to be distinct from a person's normal or true original personality. Finding one's alter ego will require finding one's other self, one with a differen ...

References

1938 novels Hollywood novels {{1930s-novel-stub