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Born and raised in New York, Mary Higgins Clark is
of Irish descent. "The Irish are, by nature, storytellers," says
Clark, who considers her Irish heritage an important influence on
her writing.
Mary's father died when she was ten. Her mother
struggled to bring up Mary and her two brothers. After graduating
from high school, Mary went to secretarial school, so she could get
a job and help her mother with the family finances. After working
for three years in an advertising agency, travel fever seized her.
For the year 1949, she was a stewardess on Pan American Airlines'
international flights, to see the world. "My run was Europe, Africa
and Asia," Mary recalls. "I was in a revolution in Syria and on the
last flight into Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain went down. I
flew for a year and then got married."
She married a neighbor, Warren Clark. Nine
years her senior, she had known him since she was 16. Soon after her
marriage, she started writing short stories. She sold her first
short story to Extension Magazine in 1956 for $100, after six
years and forty rejection slips. "I framed that first letter of
acceptance," she recalls.
Mary was left a young widow with five children
by the death of her husband, Warren Clark, from a heart attack in
1964. She went to work writing radio scripts and, in addition,
decided to write books.
Every morning, she got up at 5 and wrote until
7, when she had to get the kids ready for school. Her first book was
a biographical novel about the life of George Washington, Aspire
to the Heavens. "It was remaindered as it came off the press,"
she says of her first try. Next, she decided to write a suspense
novel, Where Are the Children?, which became a bestseller and
marked a turning point in her life and career.
After many years of widowhood, she married John
J. Conheeney, retired Merrill Lynch Futures CEO, on November 30,
1996. They now live in Saddle River, New Jersey; they also have an
apartment in Manhattan and summer homes in Spring Lake, New Jersey
and Dennis, Massachusetts. Between them, they have a large family --
Mary Higgins Clark has five children and six grandchildren, and her
husband has four children and nine grandchildren. |
