Biography of Mary Higgins Clark

Mary Higgins Clark is an author of many suspense novels. Mary was originally from the Bronx New York, born there on December 24, 1927. Mary was the second child who came after her older brother. Three years after Mary was born, there was a younger brother that came along into the family.

Mary’s parents owned an Irish pub, and they lived quite nicely from the money brought in from that. They owned a home, and also a cottage on Long Island Sound. This was also during the time of the Great Depression, but this didn’t affect the Higgins family until a later time, when the pub began to go under, and then Mary’s father died unexpectedly as well. With Mary’s mother a widow, finances became a real difficult issue since her mom had her own mouth to feed as well as her children’s. Mary had to give up her part of the house so that her mother could rent it out to boarders for some money.

More hard times continued, especially when Mary’s older brother Joseph cut his foot badly and came down with a bad case of osteomyelitis. Her brother lived in spite of the doctors predicting his sure death. Later on after Joseph was enlisted into the Navy, he did contract a bad case of spinal meningitis and died at that time.

To date, I believe she has written at least 42 books, most of which has made the bestseller list. Her very first book written was “Where Are the Children?” which has been printed for the 75th time.

Mary always loved to write even at a very young age, when she began writing poems. After she completed her high school years, she went on to attend the Wood Secretarial School. Once she completed some courses, Mary then went into secretarial work. Shortly after becoming a secretary, Mary changed roles, and trained to be an airline stewardess. She met Warren Clark, her future husband during this time, and after a year, gave up her short-lived career as flight attendant. That was back in December of 1949. After marrying Warren, Mary decided to take some writing courses at NYU just for the fun of it. She joined a writing group that met frequently to critique each others work as well as give praise.

Mary had written her first short story, Stowaway, which took six years to be sold and before that, had 6 rejections, when in 1956, this story was finally purchased by Extension Magazine for a one-hundred dollar sum.

Mary went on to have five children along with trying to write her stories. She signed a contract to write radio scripts for various radio series, one of which was Portrait of a Patriot.

Later in 1971, Mary Higgins Clark entered Fordham University, and she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy by 1979. During all of this time in Fordham University, Mary kept on writing, and her books are always works of great success today. Her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark, followed in her mom’s footsteps and also became a writer.