Howard, Maureen 1930–

PERSONAL: Born June 28, 1930, Bridgeport, CT; daughter of William L. (a county detective) and Loretta (Burns) Kearns; married Daniel F. Howard (a professor of English), August 28, 1954 (divorced, 1967); married David J. Gordon (a professor), April 2, 1968 (divorced); married Mark Probst (a financial advisor and novelist); children: (first marriage) Loretta Howard. Education: Smith College, B.A., 1952. Hobbies and other interests: Gardening, cooking.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—Gloria Loomis, Watkins, Loomis Agency, 150 East 35th St., Ste. 530, New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Author of novels, literary criticism, and book reviews; editor. Worked in publishing and advertising, 1952–54; University of California, Santa Barbara, lecturer in English and drama, 1968–69; New School for Social Research, New York, NY, lecturer in English and creative writing, 1967–68, 1970–71, 1974–; currently professor of writing, Columbia University, New York, NY; member of English Department Yale University, 1991–. Instructor at Amherst College and Brooklyn College.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellowship, 1967–68; fellow of Radcliffe Institute, 1967–68; National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction, 1980, and American Book Award nomination in autobiography/biography, 1981, both for Facts of Life; PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction nominations, 1983, for Grace Abounding, and 1987, for Expensive Habits; also for Natural History; Ingram Merrill fellow, National Endowment for the Arts, 1988; Literary Lion Award, New York Public Library, 1993; recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Not a Word about Nightingales, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1961.

Bridgeport Bus, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1966.

Before My Time, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Grace Abounding, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1982.

Expensive Habits, Summit Books (New York, NY), 1986.

(Coauthor) Mrs. Dalloway, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1990.

Natural History, Norton (New York, NY), 1992.

A Lover's Almanac, Viking (New York, NY), 1998.

(Author of introduction) Three Novels: "O Pioneers!," "The Song of the Lark," and "My Antonia," Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 1998.

Big As Life: Three Tales for Spring (novellas), Viking (New York, NY), 2001.

The Silver Screen, Viking (New York, NY), 2004.

OTHER

(Editor) Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century, University of Minnesota Press, 1977.

Facts of Life (autobiography), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978, reprinted, with new afterword by the author, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor) Contemporary American Essays, Viking (New York, NY), 1984, published as The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1985.

(Coeditor) Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish-American Women's Fiction, Henry Holt, 1997.

Also author of a produced play and of screenplays. Works included in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, 1965, edited by Martha Foley and David Burnett, Houghton Mifflin, 1965, and Statements, edited by Jonathan Baumbach, Braziller, 1975. Contributor to various periodicals, including New York Times Book Review, New Republic, New Yorker, Hudson Review, Yale Review, and Vogue.

SIDELIGHTS: Maureen Howard's literary talents are considered by many to be expansive. She is recognized as a thoroughly professional, perceptive, and sensitive literary critic and editor and a much-admired lecturer who shares her experience and thoughts on creative writing. Her novels are also praised for their clarity, linguistic precision, and character development. Peter S. Prescott declared in Newsweek that Howard is "a grand writer of English prose; she's witty and (a rarer quality in novelists) she's intelligent as well." Often compared to the writings of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, Howard's novels, in addition to her autobiography, have been described as brilliantly sensitive commentaries on contemporary American society.

Howard's first novel, Not a Word about Nightingales, portrays a family's unsuccessful attempt to achieve happiness and personal fulfillment. While on a research trip to Perugia, Italy, college professor Albert Sedgely discards his respected and secure middle-class life and family and decides to remain in the small village. After completely changing his priorities and his lifestyle, Sedgely takes a mistress and strives to find inner peace and happiness. Meanwhile, his wife sends their eighteen-year-old daughter, Rosemary, to convince Sedgely to return home. While Rosemary quickly becomes enchanted with the colorful Italian life, Sedgely becomes increasingly disenchanted. Back in the United States, Sedge-ly's wife is beginning to enjoy her newfound independence. Rosemary's attraction to her new lifestyle, too, is short-lived. Doris Grumbach explained in the New York Times Book Review that Howard's intent in Not a Word about Nightingales is to write "about the deadly continuity of the marital condition," a condition from which "there is no permanent exit, only acceptance and repetition of marriage's inexorable routine."

Not a Word about Nightingales perfectly highlights a recurring theme found in most of Howard's works of fiction—that the individual must accept the fact that the events that make up and shape his or her life are predetermined. While none of us can change our destiny, each one of us is free to grow, develop, and make choices within the limits our character allows. Remarked David M. Taylor in the Directory of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, Howard's protagonists "have limited control of their fates, but the exercise of will to effect change is championed rather than discouraged. It appears that the author believes that things will generally turn out badly, but the attempt at change is worthwhile."

In Bridgeport Bus, Howard's second novel, a major life change comes for thirty-five-year-old Mary Agnes Keely, an aspiring writer who after an argument with her stifling widowed mother leaves the home they both share and moves to New York City. Obtaining employment as a copywriter and showing real talent as a fledgling author, Mary Agnes takes in a troubled roommate, begins an affair with an advertising-agency artist, and keeps company with a group of Bohemian artists. Toward the end of the book, she finds herself pregnant and totally alone. While Elaine Ruben described Bridgeport Bus in the New Republic as "a funny, sad work some readers were fortunate to discover and then eager to pass on to friends," Daniel Stern wrote in the Saturday Review, "that such a diverse and sensitized imagination should exist in the captive body of an Irish Catholic spinster in fruitless rebellion against the paucity of experience to which she appears to be condemned is merely the cream of the irony." Stern continued that, by the time Howard's protagonist arrives at the "concluding insight that 'it was no great sin to be, at last, alone,' the reader has been rewarded for his attention in a thousand subtle but tangible ways."

Writing novels populated with solid characters such as Mary Agnes in Bridgeport Bus and other strong-willed women such as Laura Quinn in Before My Time, Maud Dowd in Grace Abounding, and Margaret Flood in Expensive Habits, in addition to the powerful cast found in her autobiography, Facts of Life, Howard is referred to by some critics as a "woman's writer." These reviewers remarked that her novels systematically revolve around women who are searching for their identity and their place within society's accepted boundaries. These female characters often work hard to grow and strive towards self-awareness, even against seemingly very difficult odds. A reviewer for the Washington Post Book World described Howard's novels as "meticulously observed and beautifully written short studies of women caught in the world of men, lost to themselves, and finding little meaning in what they do."

Most critics seemed to express a similar opinion to Paul Gray in his Time review of Before My Time when he commented that one of Howard's most identifiable and admired talents lies in her ability to successfully shape and structure the language in each of her books. This task is accomplished without distracting attention from her novel's other elements. "Certainly Miss Howard's stylistic virtuosity cannot be disputed," stated Pearl K. Bell in the New Leader. "Every inch of her prose … is trimmed and polished with meticulous skill." Sybil S. Steinberg of Publishers Weekly observed that the fact that "critics have generally praised Howard's impeccable command of language, her exact and tartly humorous prose, somewhat surprises [Howard.]" Howard explained to Steinberg: "Of course I am fascinated with language, but I don't think that is so unusual. I should think all writers who are serious about what they're doing would care a lot about language. I think it's very odd when I pick up a novel and see that language has not been honored or used well, or played with."

In her award-winning autobiography, Facts of Life, Howard recounts her life as the daughter of Irish-Catholic parents, a college professor's wife, and the experiences that have shaped her life. "Howard is a talented novelist who has never written anything so concentrated and properly disturbing as this memoir," stated Alfred Kazin in the New Republic. "The style is very, very bright; the other characters are wonderfully alive; the suffering and resentment out of which the book was written stick to it like a burr…. A painfully strong, good book." And Walter Clemons wrote in Newsweek that Facts of Life "is brief, witty and utterly original. Its candor and conspicuous reticences are exciting and puzzling…. It exemplifies Howard's unsettling combination of elegance and earthiness."

In her fourth novel, Grace Abounding, Howard follows the path of Maud Dowd's life beginning with her very colorless and spiritless existence as a forty-three-year-old widow and mother of a teenage daughter, Elizabeth. Maud spends much of her time spying on her neighbors—a pair of spinster sisters—and visiting her dying mother. Maud's life dramatically changes after her mother dies and, after ending a brief and dreadful relationship with an unworthy man, she moves to New York City to pursue vocal training for the talented Elizabeth. Maud remarries a successful and loving man, earns a Ph.D. in psychology, and becomes a children's therapist. Elizabeth, in turn, happily gives up her promising singing career to marry and have children. Life for Maud is not entirely golden however, as she copes with the death of a three-year-old patient and wrestles with her own mortality.

Robert Dawidoff wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Grace Abounding "conveys a shrewd feeling for how life changes, how things affect and happen to people, how some stories have endings and meanings and some do not, staying, rather, unresolved in several memories—and how, where faith had best be, grace had better be." "It does give a sense of lives as they are really lived such as only a small minority of novelists in each generation can or even want to manage," remarked Noel Perrin in the New York Times Book Review. "Howard … is a writer to read. Here the sensibility. There the intelligence." Diane M. Ross commented in the Chicago Tribune that "meant to involve us in the irregular rhythms of particular lives, the structure of [Grace Abounding] allows for shifting points of view and for chronological gaps in the narrative … [Grace Abounding] depends upon an accumulation of detail and a pattering of scenes rather than a straightforward plot…. Howard crosscuts between characters and locations, and blithely elides large chunks of time…. Her details are epiphanies, and they range from the ridiculous to the graceful."

At the beginning of Howard's 1986 novel, Expensive Habits, seemingly successful and well-known writer Margaret Flood lies in a hospital room after learning she has a deteriorating heart disease. The forty-five-year-old returns to her Manhattan apartment and, through a sequence of flashback scenes, the reader sees Margaret's life as a continual series of episodes—many involving loyalty and betrayal—that leave her searching for her true identity and self-worth. Margaret hopes this search will bring her the peace and contentment she so desperately desires. Jonathan Yardley suggested in the Washington Post Book World that Howard's Expensive Habits "is a serious and accomplished piece of work … certainly a book rich in integrity and elegance, by a writer who matters." Nora Johnson of the Los Angeles times Book Review wrote: "Maureen Howard's fine fifth novel attempts more, and accomplishes more, than all the others, marking her steady progress toward the highest rank of American fiction writers…. It's dazzling to see how deftly she wields her author's tools." And Gray commented in Time: "The author smuggles more subjects into a book than its length seems to allow…. [Howard] has skills that do not comfortably translate into screaming paperback covers and megabuck reprints. She is one of those rare contemporaries whose work demands, and deserves, rereadings."

Natural History broke with the author's characteristic focus. Taking place in Connecticut's affluent Fairfield County, Natural History follows the Bray family whose patriarch, Billy Bray, is county detective. The aftermath of a murder investigation Bray undertakes in 1945 leaves the family shadowed by the murdered man's brother who seeks revenge for what he feels was a botched job by Bray in bringing his brother's killer to justice. Meanwhile, the Bray children, Cathy and James, grow up and leave Bridgeport for promising careers only to return in disillusionment. Critical of what he terms the novel's "unreadability," Washington Post Book World reviewer Noel Perrin contended that "the real character in this book is the city of Bridgeport [where the author was raised] and the author's purpose is to say goodbye…. That city has turned to slums and depression and homeless people in parks, and the book is a kind of wake." Also commenting on the novel's unconventionality, Women's Review of Books writer Gail Pool found Natural History to be "something of a stew. Though [Howard] juxtaposes strands of natural, social and personal history, patterns of American hopes and familiarities, she fails to weave these threads together into an enlightening or moving whole." New Republic reviewer Marc Robinson, however, praised Howard as "linguistically acrobatic, imaginatively daring," and maintained that "Howard's refreshing distrust of psychological consistency and ultimate 'meaning' informs … Natural History, making its emotional appeal indirect, unassuming, yet all the more satisfying once found."

A Lover's Almanac, described by Lorna Sage in the New York Times Book Review as a "strange bundle of a novel," tells the story of a Generation X couple who struggle with conventional impulses toward love and marriage on the eve of the millennium. An elderly couple also begin a romance, and the novel alternates between these parallel tales of lovers, with bits of wisdom from Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and many others thrown in, in the style of the Old Farmer's Almanac, leading Sage to call the novel "rich propaganda for whatever's real, though it looks fanciful on the surface." A Kirkus Reviews critic described this novel as a work "as expansive as an almanac, with a bit of everything in it," while a reviewer for Booklist asserted that Howard's improvisations on the almanac form, including bits of astrology and faux psychic predictions, explore "the often unexpected consequences of acts both creative and destructive."

In Howard's 2004 novel The Silver Screen, silent movie actress Isabel Maher must deal with the advent of the talkies and retires in Providence, Rhode Island, to care for her disabled husband and two children who, as they mature, have difficulty dealing with their mother's exotic past. Then, as they age themselves, they must deal with their mother's illness and death and the influence her life has had on theirs. While Ann H. Fisher commented in Library Journal that Howard's "prose is a bit languid and the story sometimes convoluted," a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that Howard fleshes out the four primary characters "in lovely and precise prose and by the complexities of communication and disconnection." Donna Seaman, reviewing the novel for Booklist, stated: "The Silver Screen extends Howard's penetrating inquiry into love, art, and spirituality, and places her in accord with A.S. Byatt and Iris Murdoch."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 46, 1988.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 1997, review of A Lover's Almanac; May 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of The Silver Screen, p. 1580.

Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1982, Diane M. Ross, review of Grace Abounding.

Critics, February 1, 1979.

Harper's, November, 1978.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 1997, review of A Lover's Almanac.

Library Journal, June 15, 2004, Ann H. Fisher, review of The Silver Screen, p. 58.

Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1982, David Dawidoff, review of Grace Abounding.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 18, 1986.

Nation, December 21, 1992, p. 777.

New Leader, January 20, 1975, Pearl K. Bell, review of Before My Time; December 14, 1992, Hope Hale Davis, review of Natural History, p. 24.

New Republic, February 8, 1975, Alfred Kazin, review of Facts of Life; September 9, 1978, Elaine Ruben, review of Bridgeport Bus; October 4, 1982, Anne Tyler, review of Grace Abounding, p. 35; November 9, 1992, Marc Robinson, review of Natural History, p. 46.

Newsweek, January 20, 1975, Walter Clemons, review of Facts of Life; October 11, 1982, Peter S. Pres-cott, review of Grace Abounding, p. 109.

New York, June 19, 1995, p. 37.

New York Review of Books, December 3, 1992, p. 30.

New York Times, October 2, 1982, Anatole Broyard, review of Grace Abounding, p. 21; May 24, 1986, Michiko Kakutani, review of Expensive Habits, p. 11.

New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1975; September 26, 1982, Noel Perrin, review of Grace Abounding, p. 7; December 5, 1982, review of Grace Abounding, p. 40; June 8, 1986, Laurie Miller, review of Careless about our Lives, p. 9; October 18, 1992, Sean O'Casey, review of Natural History, p. 1; January 18, 1998, Lorna Sage, review of A Lover's Almanac, p. 6.

Partisan Review, Volume 56, number 1, 1987.

Publishers Weekly, August 24, 1992, review of Natural History, p. 58; May 17, 2004, review of The Silver Screen, p. 31.

Saturday Review, October 28, 1978, Daniel Stern, review of Bridgeport Bus.

Sewanee Review, winter, 1974–75.

Spectator, November 8, 1986.

Time, January 27, 1975, Paul Gray, review of Before My Time; May 26, 1986, Paul Gray, review of Expensive Habits, p. 78.

Washington Post Book World, October 10, 1982; May 11, 1986; November 22, 1992, p. 6.

Women's Review of Books, December 1992, Gail Pool, review of Natural History, p. 20.