Maureen Howard

Maureen Howard (born June 28, 1930) 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. In 1978 she published her autobiography Facts of Life which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. She continued writing novels and taught English at Amherst College. In 1981 she married author and stockbroker Mark Probst. She was named a fellow by the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1988. In 1993, she was awarded the Literary Lion Award by the New York Public Library.