Cauley, Harry

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Cauley, Harry

PERSONAL:

Male.

CAREER:

Writer, director, and actor.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Writers Guild of America Award, 1987, for the screenplay There Were Times, Dear.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

The Paisley Convertible: A Comedy in Three Acts, revised edition, Samuel French (New York, NY), 1967.

Let Me Hear You Smile, produced 1973.

Next Time, For Real, Samuel French (New York, NY), 1983.

NOVELS

Bridie and Finn, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1994.

The Botticelli Angel, Michael Joseph (London, England), 1995.

Millersburg, Permanent Press (Sag Harbor, NY), 2006.

OTHER

Speaking of Cats (memoir), Townsend Publishing (Exeter, NH), 2003.

Also author of There Were Times, Dear (screenplay), 1985.

SIDELIGHTS:

Harry Cauley is a playwright, director, and actor who has also found success as a novelist. His first novel, Bridie and Finn, evokes nostalgia for small-town life in New Jersey during the 1940s. Bridget "Bridie" O'Connor is an outspoken grade-school girl who befriends a neighbor boy, Timothy "Finn" Finnegan, after moving to his street. Over the course of some years, the two develop a very strong bond, and although Finn often expresses annoyance with Bridie, he eventually finds himself attracted to her. By that time, her alcoholic father has died, and Bridie has been taken in by Finn's family; but Finn finds that his father is also becoming enamored of Bridie. A Publishers Weekly reviewer considered the book to be made up of "bittersweet but hollow" scenes, and Finn's family to be the embodiment of "likable but stereotypical" Irish Catholic characters. Katherine Burkett, reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review, also described the main characters as being "straight from central casting," and called their story "engaging but predictable." Burkett did praise Cauley's "polished" writing style.

Millersburg is also set in New Jersey, in a time period just slightly earlier than that of Bridie and Finn. The book is very different in tone, however. Millersburg is narrated by a seventeen-year-old boy, who tells the story of a horrible double murder in the town, a crime for which his brother comes under suspicion. A Kirkus Reviews writer praised Cauley for his "chilling, beautifully characterized account" of how the aftershocks of the murder destroy a family, told with "tremendous skill and narrative patience."