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Mary Higgins Clark
 December 24--Christmas Eve--is the birthday of mystery
writer Mary Higgins Clark. Born in New York City in 1929, her father
died when she was ten years old, and her mother struggled to raise a
daughter and two sons. After being graduated from high school, Clark
went to secretarial school and took a job to help out with the family's
finances. She worked in an advertising agency for three years before
becoming a stewardess for Pan Am in 1949, flying routes between the U.S. and
Europe, Africa, and Asia.
"I was in a revolution in Syria and on the
last flight into Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain went down," she said.
"I flew
for a year, then got married."
 Clark married her neighbor, Warren, whom she had known
since she was 16. He was nine years her senior. He encouraged
her to develop her interest in writing, and she enrolled in writing classes at New York
University. She sold her first short story to Extension Magazine
in 1956 for $100 after six years of rejection and forty rejection slips. "I
framed that first letter of acceptance," she said.
When her husband died unexpectedly from a heart attack in
1964, Clark went to work writing radio scripts in order to support her five
children. She also began work on her first novel.
Each morning, she wrote from 5 - 7 A.M. before stopping to get her children
ready for school. Her first book--a commercial failure--was a biographical novel about George Washington.
She next decided to write a suspense novel. It turned out to be Where
Are the Children? The book marked a turning point in her career.
It became a bestseller, and today it's in its 75th edition in paperback
and was recently reissued as a Simon & Schuster hardcover classic.
 Finally free to catch up on things she always wanted to do,
Clark enrolled in Fordham University at Lincoln Center and was graduated
summa cum laude in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy.
She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Fordham in 1998 and
has served as a trustee there and at St. Peter’s College and Providence
College. She holds eighteen honorary doctorates.
In 1996, Mary Higgins Clark married John Conheeney, retired Chairman and
CEO of Merrill-Lynch Futures. They live in Saddle River, New Jersey.
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