The Dial Press, 1942. Cloth bound hardcover with dust jacket of Telegram From Heaven by Arnold Manoff.

This is the rare first novel of Arnold Manoff, who was one of the first Hollywood screenwriters blacklisted during the 1950s Red Scare. In April 1951, the director Edward Dmytryk testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Manoff was a member of the Communist Party. This novel might have contributed to his blacklisting as an excerpt appeared in the October 13, 1942 edition of the Marxist magazine New Masses.

Unable to support his family (and growing coterie of ex-wives), Manoff banded together with fellow blacklisted, Jewish writers Abraham Polonsky and Walter Bernstein, and continued writing under the pseudonym Joel Carpenter for a variety of television shows, the most prominent being the series You Are There. During this time Bernstein described Manoff as "a talent that never really flourished." Their blacklisted writers alliance was later dramatized in the 1976 film The Front, written by Bernstein.

Manoff's daughter Dinah played Carol for four seasons on the popular NBC sitcom Empty Nest. In 1992 she adapted and directed Telegram From Heaven into a stage play. She first read the novel when she was 14, six years after her father died. “...When I read the book, I felt such a connection to this young girl, who’s so much like me--and so much like him. I am my father’s daughter: I have his language, his expressions. It’s a very political play; my father was a political man. And it’s a feminist play, a coming of age story--very identifiable and very funny.”

From the dust jacket's front flap: "The Japanese Bombs which were dropped on Pearl Harbor changed the pattern of many American lives. This is the bitter, humorous, rock-bottom story of Sylvia Singer, of the Bronx, U.S.A., and what America's involvement in the war meant to her."

Good condition. 1-inch chip to the dust jacket front cover near the spine. Dust jacket soiled with dark spotting, price clipped, and has edge and corner wear present. Book covers are nice and binding is solid and square. Interior pages crisp and clean. Pages 165-172 and 289-292 are uncut along the bottom edge. A nice book with its rare dust jacket.