Faith McNulty

Who was Faith McNulty?

Faith McNulty was an American non-fiction author, probably best known for her 1980 literary journalism genre book The Burning Bed. She is also known for her authorship of wildlife pieces and books, including children's books.

She was born "Faith Corrigan" in New York City, the daughter of a judge. Young Faith attended Barnard College for one year, then attended Rhode Island State College. But she dropped out of college once she got a job as a copy girl at the New York Daily News. She later went to work for Life magazine. She worked for the U.S. Office of War Information in London during World War II.

McNulty was a wildlife writer at The New Yorker magazine for several years. In 1980, a collection of her New Yorker work was published as The Wildlife Stories of Faith McNulty. For many years, she edited the annual New Yorker compilation of the year's best children's books.

She also frequently wrote children's books on wildlife, including How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World in 1979 and When I Lived With Bats in 1998. Her 1966 book The Whooping Crane: The Bird that Defies Distinction was written for adults.

Her husband, John McNulty, was also a writer for The New Yorker and with Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese and James Baldwin, a major figure in the development of the literary genre of Creative nonfiction, which is also known as literary journalism or literature in fact. As earlier here noted, having herself been years exposed to Harold Ross' New Yorker magazine's rarefied environment, which was then so promoting of this evolving genre, Faith's own major nonfiction work, The Burning Bed, is, itself, a quintessential and quality example of the genre of literary journalism or, as Thomas Wolfe once labeled it, the “New Journalism”. After her husband John died in 1956, Faith remarried, to Richard Martin, a set designer and an inventive designer of set props.