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                                                           First Marriage

On February 28, 1931, John O'Hara and Helen Ritchie Petit ("Pet") were married in East Orange, New Jersey. This was an unhappy marriage; they divorced two or three years later. "She was nice. Pretty. Wanted to be an actress. I still see her once in a while. I like her, and always will, but if there ever were two people that shouldn't have got married..." John O'Hara describing her through Jimmy Malloy in "Imagine Kissing Pete." Matthew Bruccoli, The O'Hara Concern, page 75.
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                                                             The Ewings

On February 28, 1972, Random House published (posthumously) his last complete novel, The Ewings. "Although The Ewings is not a major O'Hara novel, it is clearly better than Lovey Childs or The Intsrument, and merited more attention than it received ... Set in Cleveland - the only O'Hara novel about the Midwest - it chronicles the rise of lawyer Bill Ewing in the booming economy of Wold War I. Rich, ambitious and hard, Ewing knows where he is going; at the end of the novel he is well on his way to becoming a young tycoon." Matthew Bruccoli, The O'Hara Concern, pages 339-340.

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