Maureen Howard

Maureen 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 Howard 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]

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)

• 1978 - National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction for Facts of Life[6]
• 1983 - Nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Grace Abounding
• 1987 - Nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Expensive Habits
• 1993 - Nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Natural History[2]
• 1993 - Literary Lion Award

• Maureen Howard biography (Google Cache)
• Summary of Howard's Novels by John Leonard
• Finding aid to Maureen Howard papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.