28 Facts About Maureen Daly

Maureen Daly was an Irish-born American writer who wrote the 1942 novel Seventeenth Summer while still in her teens.

At age 16, Daly wrote the award-winning short story "Sixteen", which appeared in many anthologies.

Maureen Daly wrote nonfiction books for adults and teenagers as well as story books for children.

Maureen Daly was one of the four Daly sisters whose successful careers in media, fashion and business were covered by national magazines during the 1940s and 1950s.

Maureen Daly co-wrote some books with her husband, mystery and crime author William P McGivern.

Maureen Daly was born March 15,1921, in Castlecaulfield, Ireland to Joseph Desmond Daly, a bicycle shop owner, and his wife Margaret Kelly Daly, who according to a Life magazine profile on the family was a distant cousin of banker Andrew Mellon and a descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Maureen Daly moved to the US in 1921, and the rest of his family had joined him by 1923 when Maureen Daly was aged two.

The youngest Maureen Daly daughter, Sheila John Maureen Daly, was born in the United States.

The family settled in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and Maureen Daly became a naturalized American citizen.

Maureen Daly regularly published work for over five decades, starting in the 1930s when she was still in high school.

Maureen Daly was encouraged to write by her high school English teacher.

At age 15, Maureen Daly entered her short story titled "Fifteen" in a competition sponsored by Scholastic; the story placed third.

Maureen Daly said in a 1986 interview that she was still receiving royalty checks for the story.

Maureen Daly began writing Seventeenth Summer, her first novel, when she was 17, but did not finish it until several years later; she completed it while attending Rosary College.

Maureen Daly entered it in an intercollegiate novel contest sponsored by publisher Dodd, Mead and won first prize.

The novel, about a 17-year-old girl's experience of first love during one summer, was published by Dodd in 1942 while Maureen Daly was still in college.

Maureen Daly explained in later interviews that she did not know Seventeenth Summer would be so successful and she needed a secure job in order to help support her mother and sisters, her father having died in 1944.

Maureen Daly had gained journalism experience while in college, including writing an advice column for teenagers that appeared in the Chicago Tribune and was syndicated to other newspapers.

Maureen Daly left in 1945 to become an associate editor for Ladies' Home Journal.

Maureen Daly wrote a series of articles on teenagers for Ladies' Home Journal that were gathered in the book Profile of Youth.

In 1950, the couple decided to become freelance writers, move to Europe with their young daughter, and travel around the world, and Maureen Daly resigned her editor position with Ladies' Home Journal.

Maureen Daly served as an editorial consultant for The Saturday Evening Post from 1960 to 1969.

Maureen Daly said that, over the years, she had turned down many requests to write a new novel or a sequel to Seventeenth Summer and that her failure to write a follow-up had led some teachers and librarians to think she was dead.

However, Maureen Daly was motivated to write two more novels after her husband Bill McGivern and their adult daughter Megan both died of cancer within one year of each other in the early 1980s.

Maureen Daly published the sequel First a Dream in 1990.

When Maureen Daly left the Chicago Tribune in 1945 to join Ladies' Home Journal, her sister Sheila John, who was then a teenager, took over Maureen Daly's syndicated advice column for teenagers and continued to write the column into the 1960s, writing several books of advice for teenagers.

Maureen Daly said that she based the character of Seventeenth Summer's narrator and protagonist Angie Morrow on herself, and the characters of the other three Morrow sisters on her own sisters.

Maureen Daly died at age 85 on September 25,2006, in Palm Desert, California of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.