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DALY, Maureen

Born 15 March 1921, County Tyrone, Ireland

Daughter of Joseph D. and Margaret Kelly Daly; married William P. McGivern, 1948

Maureen Daly began her writing career at a young age. While still a high school senior, her short story "Sixteen" placed first in a student contest in Scholastic magazine, and was selected for the O. Henry Prize Award Collection of 1938. While a student at Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest, Illinois, she worked as a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Upon graduation in 1942 she went on to the Ladies' Home Journal as an associate editor, reporter, and foreign correspondent, and in the early 1950s, she began writing for the Saturday Evening Post. Throughout her career, Daly interposed magazine and newspaper work with writing for films and television.

Daly's stories have been widely published in national magazines such as Vogue, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, and Woman's Home Companion. Her writing for the magazine audience centers on problems relating to the socialization process and the psychology of adolescence. Daly's stories, novels, articles, and columns hold a prominent place among works designed to advise and reassure young women in their struggle for identity throughout adolescence. Among her works of these genres are "Sixteen," "What's Your P. Q.? (Personality Quotient)," a syndicated column for teenagers, and a cultural commentary in "Meet a SubDeb" installments for the Ladies' Home Journal.

Daly's first novel, Seventeenth Summer (1942, 1985) is by far her best known and most highly acclaimed publication. Described as the Little Women of the 20th century, it has gone through innumerable printings since its first publication. Set in the author's own hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the story relates the hope, joy, pain, and sadness of a first young love. Accolades for the book called it serious, sensitive, charming, and original, with appreciation of and insight into youthful emotions. The novel is written in an expert but simple style, and is notable for creating a Midwestern summer ambience of evocative nostalgia for growing up in the American heartland.

Reviewers regarded Seventeenth Summer the start of a promising career for a young writer with a keen sense of emotional states and inner feelings. To this day, Daly is viewed as offering an exceptionally fresh approach to a genre customarily dominated by clichéd formulas. Daly's individual and memorable treatment of the theme of young love shows how a writer's imagination and personal insight can bring overused literary themes alive. Daly's repertoire also includes children's books, light foreign-locale fiction, and anthologies of classic short stories for young adults.

Daly's reputation is based on her flair for translating personal experience and memory of teenage life—with its hopes, frustrations, and inhibitions—into a popular and sympathetic vernacular. Her first story, "Sixteen," was not originally intended for publication, but was a personal exercise in introspection and catharsis meant to "relieve the tense hurt feelings inside." Daly believes her empathy for adolescence depends on her gift for remaining psychically close to the experiences of that period. A collection of her news column commentaries, Smarter and Smoother: A Handbook on How to Be That Way (1944), drew its effectiveness from Daly's involved but mature identification with her audience. It has been reviewed as "the best, all things considered, of our high school manners and ethics."