Maureen Howard

Maureen Howard (born June 28, 1930) is an American writer, editor, and lecturer known for her award-winning autobiography Facts of Life. Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Literary Lion Award.

Maureen Howard
BornMaureen Kearns
(1930-06-28) June 28, 1930
Bridgeport, Connecticut
LanguageEnglish
Alma materSmith College
GenreFiction, memoir
Notable worksFacts of Life
Notable awardsNational Book Critics Circle Award
SpouseDaniel F. Howard (1954-1967)
David J. Gordon (1968-?)
Mark Probst (1981-present)

Biography

Kearns was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, June 28, 1930. Her father William L. Kearns worked for the State's Attorney's Office as a detective where he was assigned to the Harold Israel case.[1] Howard attended Smith College, graduating with a B.A. in 1952. After graduation she worked in advertising for several years and married Professor Daniel F. Howard in 1954. In 1960, Howard published her first novel Not a Word about Nightingales, which tells the story of a New England girl who is sent to Perugia, Italy to retrieve her father who is on an extended sabbatical. The book was a bestseller and she followed it with several other novels set in New England with Irish-American protagonists.[2] She divorced Daniel in 1967 and married David J. Gordon the following year. In 1967, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The same year she was named a Radcliffe Institute Fellow. During the late 1960s and 1970s she taught literature, drama and creative writing at The New School and UCSB and lectured at CUNY and Columbia University.[3] In 1978 she published her autobiography Facts of Life which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. She continued writing novels and taught English at Amherst College. In 1981 she married author and stockbroker Mark Probst.[4] She was named a fellow by the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1988. In 1993, she was awarded the Literary Lion Award by the New York Public Library.[5]

Bibliography
Novels
  • Not a Word about Nightingales (1960)
  • Bridgeport Bus (1965)
  • Before My Time (1975)
  • Grace Abounding (1982)
  • Expensive Habits (1986)
  • Natural History (1992)
  • A Lover's Almanac (1998)
  • Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring (novellas) (2001)
  • The Silver Screen (2004)
  • The Rags of Time (2009)
Nonfiction
  • Facts of Life (autobiography) (1978)
As editor or contributor
  • Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century: An Introduction (Editor) (1977)
  • The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays (Editor) (1984)
  • Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women's Fiction, edited by Caledonia Kearns (Foreword and contributor) (1997)
  • Three Novels: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia, by Willa Cather (Introduction) (1998)

Awards

References
  1. "You Are There" by Maureen Howard. In Beyond document: essays on nonfiction film by Charles Warren. pp 181-204. Wesleyan University Press (1996). ISBN 0-8195-6290-4.
  2. Ireland and the Americas: culture, politics, and history by James Patrick Byrne, Philip Coleman and Jason Francis King. pp 426-7. ABC-CLIO (2008). ISBN 1-85109-614-0.
  3. "Maureen Howard" in Modern Irish-American fiction: a reader by Daniel J. Casey. page 16. Syracuse University Press (1989) ISBN 0-8156-0234-0.
  4. "Maureen Howard Bride Of Mark Probst, Broker". New York Times. January 17, 1981.
  5. International who's who of authors and writers, Europa Publications Limited. page 261 (2003). ISBN 1-85743-179-0
  6. The Cambridge guide to women's writing in English by Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer, Elaine Showalter. page 330. Cambridge University Press (1999). ISBN 0-521-66813-1.
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