Maureen Howard

Who is Maureen Howard?

Maureen Howard is an American writer, editor, and lecturer known for her award-winning autobiography Facts of Life.

She was born Maureen Kearns in Bridgeport, Connecticut. 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. 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. 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.