Mary Higgins Clark is widely known as the "Queen of Suspense." Millions of copies of her books have been sold all over the world, but she is most famous for her 20+ suspense novels. Many of those novels have been turned into television movies, and two have become feature films.
Here's a snippet about her early life from her biography on
MaryHigginsClark.com:
Mary Higgins Clark's fame as a writer was achieved against heavy odds. Born and raised in the Bronx, her father died when she was eleven and her mother struggled to raise her and her two brothers. On graduating from high school, she went to secretarial school, so she could get a job and help with the family finances. After three years of working in an advertising agency, travel fever seized her. For the year 1949, she was a stewardess on Pan American Airlines' international flights. "My run was Europe, Africa and Asia," she recalls. "I was in a revolution in Syria and on the last flight into Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain went down. After flying for a year, she married a neighbor, Warren Clark, nine years her senior, whom she had known since she was 16. Soon after her marriage, she started writing short stories, finally selling her first to Extension Magazine in 1956 for $100.
Left a young widow by the death of her husband from a heart attack in 1964, Mary Higgins Clark went to work writing radio scripts and, in addition, decided to try her hand at writing books. Every morning, she got up at 5 AM and wrote until 7 AM, when she had to get her five children ready for school. Her very first book was a biographical novel about George Washington... Read the rest of her story on her website.
Though she is now in her 80s, Clark continues to write. Her latest novel entitled
Daddy's Gone a Hunting, was published in April of 2013. We have several Mary Higgins Clark books on display this month in the fiction section of the library media center. Check out one today!
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