Daly, Maureen

views updated

Daly, Maureen

Personal

Born March 15, 1921, in Castlecaufield, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland; naturalized U.S. citizen; daughter of Joseph Desmond (a salesman) and Margaret (Mellon-Kelly) Daly; married William P. McGivern (a writer), December 28, 1946 (died November, 1983); children: Megan (deceased), Patrick. Education: Rosary College, B.A., 1942. Politics: Democrat.

Addresses

Home—P.O. Box 3875, Palm Desert, CA 92261.

Career

Writer and journalist. Freelance writer, beginning 1938. Chicago Tribune, Chicago, IL, police reporter and columnist, 1941-44; Chicago City News Bureau, Chicago, reporter, 1941-43; Ladies' Home Journal, Philadelphia, PA, associate editor, 1944-49; Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia, editorial consultant, 1960-69; Desert Sun, Palm Desert, CA, reporter and columnist, beginning 1987. Screenwriter for Twentieth Century-Fox; has lectured on foreign lands and emerging nations.

Member

PEN, Mystery Writers of America, Writers Guild of America (West).

Awards, Honors

Scholastic magazine short story contest awards, 1936, third prize for "Fifteen," 1937, first prize for "Sixteen"; O. Henry Memorial Award, 1938, for short story "Sixteen"; Dodd, Mead Intercollegiate Literary Fellowship Novel Award, 1942, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, 1969, both for Seventeenth Summer; Freedoms Foundation Award, 1952, for "humanity in reporting"; Gimbel Fashion Award, 1962, for contribution to U.S. fashion industry through Saturday Evening Post articles; named Notable Wisconsin Author, 1982; Acts of Love selected one of Redbook's ten great books for teens, 1987.

Writings

YOUNG-ADULT FICTION

Seventeenth Summer, Dodd (New York, NY), 1942, illustrated edition, 1948, reprinted, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2002.

Sixteen and Other Stories, illustrated by Kendall Rossi, Dodd (New York, NY), 1961.

Acts of Love, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1986.

First a Dream, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1990.

YOUNG-ADULT FICTION; EDITOR

My Favorite Stories, Dodd (New York, NY), 1948.

My Favorite Mystery Stories, Dodd (New York, NY), 1966.

My Favorite Suspense Stories, Dodd (New York, NY), 1968.

YOUNG-ADULT NONFICTION

Smarter and Smoother: A Handbook on How to Be That Way (collected newspaper columns), illustrated by Marguerite Bryan, Dodd (New York, NY), 1944.

What's Your P.Q. (Personality Quotient)?, illustrated by Ellie Simmons, Dodd (New York, NY), 1952, revised edition, 1966.

Twelve around the World, illustrated by Frank Kramer, Dodd (New York, NY), 1957.

Spanish Roundabout (travel), Dodd (New York, NY), 1960.

Moroccan Roundabout (travel), Dodd (New York, NY), 1961.

JUVENILE

Patrick Visits the Farm (fiction), illustrated by Ellie Simmons, Dodd (New York, NY), 1959.

Patrick Takes a Trip (fiction), illustrated by Ellie Simmons, Dodd (New York, NY), 1960.

Patrick Visits the Library (fiction), illustrated by Paul Lantz, Dodd (New York, NY), 1961.

Patrick Visits the Zoo (fiction), illustrated by Sam Savitt, Dodd (New York, NY), 1963.

The Ginger Horse (fiction), illustrated by Wesley Dennis, Dodd (New York, NY), 1964.

Spain: Wonderland of Contrasts (nonfiction), Dodd (New York, NY), 1965.

The Small War of Sergeant Donkey (fiction), illustrated by Wesley Dennis, Dodd (New York, NY), 1966, reprinted, Bethlehem Books (Bathgate, ND), 2000.

Rosie, the Dancing Elephant (fiction), illustrated by Lorence Bjorklund, Dodd (New York, NY), 1967.

OTHER

The Perfect Hostess: Complete Etiquette and Entertainment for the Home, Dodd (New York, NY), 1950.

(Editor) Profile of Youth (adult), Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1951.

(Under name Maureen Daly McGivern; with husband, William P. McGivern) Mention My Name in Mombasa: The Unscheduled Adventures of an American Family Abroad (memoir), illustrated by Frank Kramer, Dodd (New York, NY), 1958.

(With husband, W. P. McGivern) A Matter of Honor, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1984.

Also author of "High School Career" series, Curtis Publishing Co., 1942-49. Author, with William P. McGivern, of scripts for television series, including Kojak, and of screenplay Brannigan. Work represented in several textbooks and anthologies. Contributor of over two hundred articles to periodicals, including Vogue, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day, Scholastic, Woman's Home Companion, and Redbook.

Daly's papers are housed in a permanent collection at the University of Oregon Library.

Adaptations

Film rights to Seventeenth Summer were purchased by Warner Bros., 1949; The Ginger Horse was filmed by Walt Disney Studios; Daly's short story "You Can't Kiss Caroline" has also been dramatized.

Sidelights

As the author of the groundbreaking novel Seventeenth Summer, Maureen Daly is credited with establishing young adult literature as a genre separate from the juvenile or adult publishing markets. With her debut novel in continuous publication since it first appeared in 1942, Daly's name remains recognizable to readers both young and old. Other popular young-adult titles written by Daly include Acts of Love and First a Dream. In addition to her books for both teens and younger readers, Daly has also written several volumes of nonfiction for adults, published numerous articles and columns in newspapers and periodicals that include the Chicago Tribune and Desert Sun, and authored screenplays for films and television.

Irish Roots

Born in 1921 in northern Ireland, Daly and her mother and two sisters eventually moved to Wisconsin to join her father, Joseph Daly, who had immigrated earlier. An avid reader, Daly haunted her local library on a weekly basis and enjoyed books by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Edna Ferber, and Sinclair Lewis during high school. She also enjoyed writing, and because of her combination of talent and discipline—Daly adopted a strict writing regime at an early age—she was an award-winning writer by the time she reached age fifteen in 1936, when a story she entered in Scholastic magazine's short-story contest won third prize. The next year, Daly's English teacher submitted another of her stories to the contest; "Sixteen," a tale about a boy and a girl who meet at a skating rink, was awarded first prize, and since Scholastic first printed it in 1938 it has been included in over three hundred anthologies and published in twelve different languages. The story is also in Daly's collection Sixteen and Other Stories. "Even now, when I get checks from the reprint of 'Sixteen,' it's like seeing an old friend from 1938," Daly commented to an interviewer for Publishers Weekly.

In 1938 Daly enrolled at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. Coming home after her freshman year, she announced that she was going to write her first novel. Making an office in the basement of her parent's home, she went to work, and after three years finished Seventeenth Summer. The story focuses on seventeen-year-old Angie, who falls in love with a boy from her small town. Daly submitted her manuscript to New York City publishing house Dodd during her senior year at college, where it was promptly accepted for publication. The novel quickly became a bestseller, making Daly a successful author at the age of twenty-one. Seventeenth Summer has remained in print ever since, selling more than a million copies worldwide.

Seventeenth Summer

Set in a rural Wisconsin town, Seventeenth Summer follows the sweet and innocent romance of teenagers Angie Morrow and Jack Daly as they experience all the joys and tribulations universally felt by teens discovering love for the first time. Angie, who narrates the story, and her three sisters are modeled after Daly and her siblings; her mother provides a supportive role as a confidante, while her father remains a distant character. Although the novel's plot is simple, as an essayist in the St. James Guide to Young-Adult Literature noted, "the sensitivity toward adolescent feelings which pervades the [femaleoriented] story leads readers to remember the book long after finishing it."

When Daly's novel was published in 1942 there was no young adult fiction category for reviewers to pigeonhole it into; instead, Seventeenth Summer was held up to the standards of an adult novel. Reviewers were quick to praise the book's sensitive portrayal of the many and varied emotions and facets that come into play during an adolescent's experience of first love. "Seventeenth Summer perhaps captures better than any other novel the spirit of adolescence," stated Dwight L. Burton in English Journal. "More than just a love story of two adolescents," the critic added, "Seventeenth Summer, with its introspection and fine mastery of the scene, portrays the adolescent validly in several . . . important relationships—with . . . family, with . . . age mates, and, very important, with [oneself]. . . . In each of these three aspects, Miss Daly is discerning." Characterizing the novel's tone as "Lyrically young and breathless," Edith H. Walton noted in her review of Seventeenth Summer for the New York Times Book Review that the novel "deals with one of the oldest themes in the world, the theme of first love, and deals with it in a fashion which is so unhackneyed and so fresh that one forgets how often the same story has been told before. . . . Completely up to date in its idiom and its atmosphere, vividly authentic in a warm and homely way, it seems to me to be as unpretentiously good a first novel as any one could ask. . . . Simply, eloquently, Maureen Daly tells one how youth in love really feels—how it felt yesterday and how it feels today."

As the author once explained, Seventeenth Summer "was written in a spurt of creativity and emotion because I was so wildly and vividly happy about love and life at a particular time in my existence. I knew that euphoria and hope could not last (and it didn't) and I wanted to get all that fleeting excitement down on paper before it passed, or I forgot the true feelings. Lucky I did. I have never felt so hopeful since. It was not until the reviews came out (and the royalties came in) that I realized I had recorded universal emotions and joys—and people would want to read about them year after year." Proof of that universality came in the new millennium. As Booklist's Michael Cart noted in 2002, "In the beginning was the romance.... Daly's ur-romance, Seventeenth Summer, was the first young adult novel." Cart went on to note the distance that the young-adult novel had traveled since 1942, with the advent of edgy problem novels. Yet through it all, according to Cart, romance "remains a staple of paperback publishing," accounting for fully half of trade paperbacks. "Clearly, the more things change in the world of young adult literature, the more they remain the same," Cart wrote, pointing to the fact that Simon and Schuster was bringing out a hardcover edition of Seventeenth Summer that very year. Reviewing that edition, Claire Martin, writing in the Denver Post, called Daly a "breathtaking writer," further noting that the author is "able to put in words those gossamer emotions that young lovers struggle to name." Similarly, Kim Childress, writing in Girl's Life, dubbed the novel a "classic story of first love."

Does Not Give Up "Day Job"

Despite her success as a novelist with Seventeenth Summer, Daly decided to pursue a career in journalism, and while still in college she got a job as a reporter covering the police beat for the Chicago Tribune. Journalism provided the disciplined writer with a new challenge. As she later recalled in Publishers Weekly: "I had to work really hard to keep all the details straight, when I called from the scene of news stories. I was so afraid they would fire a question at me and I wouldn't have the answer. Often I'd be standing in phone booths with sweat pouring down my back."

In addition to reporting on crime for the Chicago Tribune, Daly also reviewed books and wrote an advice column for the paper's Sunday magazine. Aimed at teens, Daly's column, "On the Solid Side," was so popular the paper soon ran it three times a week. "On the Solid Side" was eventually syndicated to more than a dozen newspapers, and a collection of Daly's articles was published in 1944 as Smarter and Smoother. By the following year, the book had gone into its ninth printing. A Kirkus Reviews critic suggested that "parents should be thankful to Maureen Daly for she gives all the advice and counsel that teenagers think is sermonizing from parents, but that they'll lap up in this form."

Throughout much of her adult life, Daly has worked as a journalist and has been on staff at such respected publications as Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. In addition to several awards, she has earned a reputation as a talented and thorough professional. As a freelancer, Daly also became known for being prolific; she has penned and published hundreds of articles on a wide variety topics, many of which explore one of her favorite subjects—travel and foreign lands—which she developed after marrying mystery writer William P. McGivern in 1946.

In 1949 Daly left her job as associate editor for Ladies' Home Journal and moved to Europe with her husband and two-year-old daughter, Megan. Working as a freelance writer while raising her growing family—the McGiverns also had a son, Patrick—Daly spent time in Paris, Rome, Dublin, London, and Spain, reported on the important issues of the day, and interviewed such notable people as Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. When her children reached their teen years, Daly and her family returned to the United States and bought a farm in Pennsylvania. Highway development eventually encroached upon their rural home, and the McGiverns moved to California, where Daly has continued to make her home.

Daly's years traveling and living in Europe were the inspiration for several books on travel, including her own family's personal experiences in Mention My Name in Mombasa: The Unscheduled Adventures of an American Family Abroad. Writing with her husband, Daly introduces readers to the quaint places and captivating people her family encountered during their travels. A Kirkus Reviews writer dubbed Mention My Name in Mombasa "charming," and went on to comment: "Writing with intelligence, sympathy and humor, interested in people rather than scenery . . . the book should appeal to all kinds of travelers."

Daly also shares her travel experiences with younger readers in Spain: Wonderland of Contrasts and with young adults in Twelve around the World, SpanishRoundabout, and Moroccan Roundabout. In the New York Times Book Review Lavinia R. Davis stated that Spanish Roundabout "is not a guide book in the usual sense. It is, rather, a cohesive series of profiles and sketches of Spain drawn from affection, experience and compassion.... [The] emphasis is on people in contemporary Spain. Family life, bull-fighting, religious observances, cooking and teenage mores are described so skillfully and with such a complete lack of condescension that the reader cannot help sharing the author's enthusiasm and eager curiosity."

Returns to Young Adult Fiction

Daly's husband died in 1982 after a long battle with cancer; her daughter, Megan, died of cancer a year later. Grief stricken, Daly attempted to write about her feelings, but judged the results too depressing. Then, during a day spent whale watching with friends on the Baja California coast, she found herself in a different frame of mind. She returned home and began a new novel about her daughter, looking back to Megan's "seventeenth summer." That work was published in 1986 as Acts of Love. Another young-adult novel, First a Dream, which focuses on a young woman who moves from Pennsylvania to California during high school, followed in 1990. As in Seventeenth Summer, Daly's more recent novels provide her fans with a sensitive love story that involves many of the experiences and emotions young people realize on their road to maturity. Describing Daly as "the spiritual grandmother of the young adult novel," Richard Peck noted in the Los Angeles Times that "well before the term 'YA' was coined" to connote a young adult readership, Daly "wrote the perennial best-seller, Seventeenth Summer. With Acts of Love she returns after 44 years to the sort of love story she pioneered when she was herself a YA."

In Acts of Love, teenager Retta Caldwell, a member of an upper-class family, falls for Dallas Dobson, the son of the town deadbeat. Family crises intervene, but still romance grows between Retta and Dallas. However, when Retta's father announces that the family is going to move to California, things look bleak for the couple, until Dallas manages to find a summer job near his girlfriend's new home. Dorcas Hand, writing in School Library Journal, found Acts of Love to be a "quick, easy story that will be popular with teens." Daly's First a Dream, the sequel to Acts of Love, picks up the story where it leaves off in the first title, with Retta delighted when Dallas lands a summer job nearby her new home in California. Dallas works on a ranch, and Retta works at her father's newspaper; as they spend their off-hours together, their relationship slowly grows and matures. But as the summer draws to a close, the two dread the fact of their impending separation. A solution is found in the form of an inheritance for Retta: she receives family property in Pennsylvania, which she must live on for two years in order to claim. Joyce Adams, writing in School Library Journal, found Daly's "fairy tale ending" a "major flaw" in a novel the critic otherwise characterized as "sensitive and poignant." A contributor for Publishers Weekly thought First a Dream to be a "disappointing sequel," but went on to call the novel a "bittersweet love story."

"I write more than one kind of book," Daly once explained of her writing career. "In travel books I try to put down what I see, feel and learn as vividly and memorably as the experiences that have occurred to me. In fiction I am an entertainer but sometimes a sad one. The stories—fictionalized versions of real life—are often melancholy but sometimes there is a joy, and a relief, in just sharing a human adventure." The disciplined habits she developed as a young woman have continued to guide her life: writing in the early morning, breaking for lunch, then writing into the late afternoon. A popular speaker, she has appeared at a number of conferences, as well as spoken to classes of students in public schools and universities.

If you enjoy the works of Maureen Daly

If you enjoy the works of Maureen Daly, you might want to check out the following books:

Judy Blume, Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil, Hope and Love, 1982.

Ruth Doan MacDougal, The Cheerleader, 1973.

Rosamund du Jardin, Practically Seventeen, 1949.

Ann Head, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, 1967.

"Writing is my kind of freedom, the chance to look outward as well as inward," the award-winning writer also explained. "It is an excellent excuse for curiosity, for traveling, studying, and just staring at other people and other scenes. I am constantly plagued by the 'need to know,' not just to stockpile lists of facts and statistics but to have some understanding of what it is like to be someone else, or live somewhere else. So I travel to 'see' and write to 'think' and find out about myself and other people I meet—or invent." In the late 1980s Daly honored her daughter's memory by endowing a library at the Barbara Sinatra Children's Center at the Eisenhower Medical Complex in Rancho Mirage, California. Into her eighties by the 2000s, Daly continues to write, contributing a restaurant review column to her local paper, the Desert Sun of Palm Springs.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 17, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Gallo, Donald, editor, Speaking for Ourselves: Autobiographical Sketches by Notable Authors of Books for Children, National Council of Teachers of English (Urbana, IL), 1990.

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Something about the Author Autobiography Series, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

PERIODICALS

ALAN Review, spring, 1994, Nancy Vogel, "The Semicentennial of Seventeenth Summer: Some Questions and Answers."

Booklist, September 15, 2002, Michael Cart, review of Seventeenth Summer, p. 223.

Chicago Tribune, September 1, 1986.

Denver Post, August 18, 2002, Claire Martin, review of Seventeenth Summer, p. EE02.

English Journal, September, 1951, Dwight L. Burton, "The Novel for the Adolescent," p. 15.

Girl's Life, June-July, 2003, Kim Childress, review of Seventeenth Summer, p. 46.

Journal of Reading, February, 1993, Lisa Ann Richarson, "A Retrospective with Maureen Daly," p. 424.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1944, "Fifteen and Up: 'Smarter and Smoother,'" p. 120; July 15, 1958, review of Mention My Name in Mombasa, p. 535.

Life, November 7, 1949, "Career Sisters"; May 11, 1959, "They All Made Good."

Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1986, Richard Peck, review of Acts of Love, p. 10.

Nebraska English Journal, spring, 1992, Nancy Vogel, "The Semicentennial of Seventeenth Summer: Maureen Daly's Acts of Love."

New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1942, Edith H. Walton, review of Seventeenth Summer, p. 7; July 12, 1942; July 24, 1960, Lavinia R. Davis, "For Younger Readers: 'People in Action,'" p. 20.

Publishers Weekly, June 27, 1986, Kimberly Olson Fakih, "The Long Wait for Maureen Daly," pp. 36, 38-39; March 30, 1990, review of First a Dream, p. 64.

School Library Journal, October, 1986, Dorcas Hand, review of Acts of Love, p. 189; April, 1990, Joyce Adams Burner, review of First a Dream, p. 139.

Wilson Library Bulletin, February, 1991, Cathi MacRae, review of First A Dream, p. 118.