Mary Higgins Clark Biography

Works:

• 1975 Where Are The Children?
• 1977 A Stranger is Watching
• 1980 The Cradle Will Fall
• 1982 A Cry in the Night
• 1984 Stillwatch
• 1987 Weep No More, My Lady
• 1989 While My Pretty One Sleeps
• 1992 All Around the Town
• 1993 I’ll Be Seeing You
• 1993 Death on the Cape and Other Stories
• 1994 Remember Me
• 1994 The Lottery Winner and Other Stories
• 1995 Let Me Call You Sweetheart
• 1996 Moonlight Becomes You
• 1997 Pretend You Don’t See Her
• 1999 We’ll Meet Again
• 2000 Before I Say Good-Bye
• 2001 On The Street Where You Live
• 2002 Daddy’s Little Girl
• 2003 The Second Time Around
• 2004 The Christmas Thief (with daughter Carol Higgins Clark)
• 2005 No Place Like Home
• 2006 Two Little Girls in Blue
• 2006 Santa Cruise (with daughter Carol Higgins Clark)
• 2007 Ghost Ship: A Cape Cod Story
• 2007 I Heard That Song Before
• 2010 The Shadow of Your Smile
• 2011 I’ll Walk Alone
• 2012 The Lost Years
• 2013 Daddy’s Gone A Hunting
• 2015 All Dressed in White (co-authored with Alafair Burke)
• 2016 As Time Goes By

Mary Higgins Clark is a bestselling author of mystery and suspense books, best known for the novel Where Are the Children?

Mary Higgins Clark was born on December 24, 1927, in the Bronx. She published her first short story in 1956. Widowed in 1964 and with five children to care for, Clark decided to try her hand at books. Her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children? was an instant bestseller. Clark was president of Mystery Writers of America and has an award named for her. She lives in Saddle River, New Jersey.

Writer Mary Higgins Clark was born Mary Theresa Eleanor Higgins on December 24, 1927, in the Bronx, New York, to Nora and Luke Higgins. Higgins’ father died when she was 11, and after she graduated from high school she worked as a secretary to help support the family as the second of three children. She spent a year as a flight attendant with Pan Am before marrying a neighbor, Warren Clark, who was nine years her senior.

Mary began writing short stories and published her first in 1956. Her husband died in 1964 leaving the young widow to care for their five children alone. She wrote four-minute radio scripts to help pay the bills until her agent encouraged her to try her hand at books. She sold her first short story, “Stowaway,” when she was 28 years old. Her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, was published in 1975 and was an instant bestseller. In addition to writing, she returned to school to earn her philosophy degree from Fordham University in 1979.

Over the next few decades, the prolific Clark wrote more than two dozen suspense novels that sold over 80 million copies in the United States alone. She is the bestselling fiction author in France and has held numerous posts among mystery genre circles, including president of Mystery Writers of America and Chairman of the International Crime Congress. She is also the inspiration for the Mystery Writers of America’s Mary Higgins Clark Award.

Two of her novels—Where Are the Children? and A Stranger Is Watching (1978)—have been made into films. In addition, several of her popular works, both short stories and novels, have been made into television films. She continues the release of her mystery novels with the book Daddy’s Gone A Hunting (2013).

Outside of writing, Clark is a proud and active Irish American Catholic, and was made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, a papal honor. She also acts as an Honorary Chairman of FraXa Research, an organization devoted to finding proper medication to treat Fragile X syndrome, a condition that one of her children suffers from.

She married John J. Conheeney, former Merrill-Lynch Futures CEO, in 1996. The couple lives in Saddle River, New Jersey, and Manhattan. Her memoir, Kitchen Privileges, was published in 2003.

REFERENCE:http://www.biography.com/people/mary-higgins-clark-278967