Origins
McCaffrey finished Dragonquest, a sequel to the first Pern book, soon after her 1970 emigration to Ireland but she wrote several stories and a few books before completing the original Dragonriders trilogy. Writing The White Dragon did not really begin until 1974/75 after the New England Science Fiction Association invited her to its annual convention Boskone as Guest of Honor, which included the special publication of a small book for sale on site.
The market for young adults provided crucial opportunities while Dragonriders stalled. Editor Roger Elwood sought contributions of short work to anthologies and McCaffrey started the Pern story of Menolly for him, although in the end she delivered four 1973/74 stories that later became Crystal Singer. Editor Jean E. Karl, who had established the children's and science fiction imprints at Atheneum Books, sought to attract more female readers to science fiction and solicited "a story for young women in a different part of Pern". McCaffrey completed Menolly's story as Dragonsong and contracted for a sequel before it was out in 1976.
Having the arrangements with Atheneum in writing, McCaffrey was able to shop for a mortgage and buy a home, to be called 'Dragonhold' for the dragons who bought it. Twenty years later her son wrote that she "first set dragons free on Pern and then was herself freed by her dragons."
Like Crystal Singer, Dragonsong features a young woman with great musical talent. Beside fishing, its focus in Pernese society is the arts and education, in contrast to the military and political focus of the original trilogy. In this the action at Harper Hall rather than the Weyrs is akin to McCaffrey's own experience. At Radcliffe College, Harvard, she majored in Slavonic Languages and Literature. From her teens through her thirties, before she turned to writing full-time, she pursued musical avocations: piano lessons, voice training and performance, and assisting in amateur production of musicals and operettas.
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