24 Facts About Maureen Howard

Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor.

Maureen Howard's award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.

Maureen Howard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on June 28,1930.

Maureen Howard's father, William L Kearns, was an Irish immigrant who worked as a detective in Fairfield County, where he was assigned to the Harold Israel case.

Maureen Howard's mother, Loretta, was a homemaker and the daughter of an Irish immigrant who amassed a fortune from land development and owning an asphalt plant.

Maureen Howard credited her mother with exposing her to fine arts, enrolling her in lessons for ballet, piano, and elocution, in contrast to the experience with her father.

Maureen Howard was often critical of her education at Smith, which was at that time still very much delivering a genteel and sanitized education for women, but she continued to be connected to her alma mater.

Maureen Howard was a professor of English at Williams College and Kenyon College before joining Rutgers University in 1960, where he eventually chaired the English department.

In 1960, Maureen Howard published her first novel, Not a Word About Nightingales, which drew on her familiarity with academia to tell the story of a professor who decides to abandon family, job, and country while on sabbatical in Italy.

Maureen Howard followed it in 1977 with a book on American women writers that she edited.

Maureen Howard's next book was a memoir, Facts of Life, which some scholars have regarded as among her best work.

Maureen Howard joined the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University in 1993.

Maureen Howard had previously been an instructor at Columbia's School of General Studies in the 1980s.

Maureen Howard then began to write a quartet of books inspired by the four seasons: A Lover's Almanac, The Silver Screen, and The Rags of Time, and the collection of novellas called Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring.

Maureen Howard died in Manhattan on March 13,2022, at the age of 91.

Maureen Howard's papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials, are housed at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University.

Maureen Howard's books have often been called experimental, since they rely on literary techniques such as shifting perspectives and nonlinear narration.

Critics have noted that Maureen Howard's novels tend to minimize plot, focusing instead on an attempt to capture characters and "an accumulation of moments", or what Keefe Durso has termed "landscapes of memory".

Maureen Howard explains that Irish Catholic culture forms the setting in which Howard's dramas play out, and even when Howard's characters break from Catholicism they do so by making new religions out of secular pursuits.

The scholar Sally Barr Ebest has noted that, in this, Maureen Howard's work has much in common with the novels of other Irish-American women writers, which are immersed in Catholic culture.

Perrin, too, points out that, rather than depicting antagonism between genders, Maureen Howard "has been consistently concerned with how women deal with their families, and especially their mothers".

Maureen Howard has written of her admiration for numerous writers, including Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Flannery O'Connor.

Maureen Howard's work has been anthologized in Modern Irish American Fiction: A Reader and Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women's Fiction.

Maureen Howard has been an invited speaker at numerous institutions, including Rutgers University.