Mary Higgins Clark

Author. Known as the "Queen of Suspense," she has published over 50 internationally best selling novels. The daughter of Irish immigrants, she graduated from Wood Secretarial School and went to work at Remington Rand, the typewriter manufacturer. She wrote catalog copy alongside Joseph Heller and modeled for brochures with a young Grace Kelly. She became a stewardess for Pan American Airlines in 1948 and married her neighbor, Warren Clark, in December 1949. No longer working as a stewardess, she took writing courses at New York University. She sold her first short story, "Stowaway" to Extension Magazine in 1956. Her marriage to Clark produced five children, and after his death from a heart attack in 1964, she wrote scripts for radio series. Her first novel, "Aspire to the Heavens," a fictionalized story about George and Martha Washington, was published in 1968. Her second novel, "Where Are the Children?" (1975) became a best seller. Her novels have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list and have also been extremely popular in France. A number of her novels were subsequently adapted for film, such as "A Stranger is Watching" (1982), "Remember Me (1995), and "Loves Music, Loves to Dance" (2001). Her later work included writing children's stories and co-authoring novels with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark. She was awarded 18 honorary degrees and many other honors which included the Horatio Alger Award (1997), the American Irish Historical Society Gold Medal of Honor (1993), and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (2001). She was inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame in 2011, and was made a Dame of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, a Dame of Malta, and a Dame of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. She married John J. Conheeney, the retired CEO of Merrill Lynch Futures in 1998. She died in Naples, Florida from natural causes.