Maureen Howard

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Maureen Theresa Howard (née Kearns) was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor born on June 28, 1930, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She died on March 13, 2022, in Manhattan, New York, at the age of 91. Howard was known for novels featuring women protagonists, formal experimentation, and a focus on the Irish‑American experience.

She studied at Smith College, graduating in 1952, and went on to teach writing and literature at several institutions, including Yale University, Columbia University, The New School, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the City University of New York.

Howard’s work often explores family, class, history, religion, and the lives of women in American society, using shifting perspectives and nontraditional narrative forms. Her debut novel, Not a Word About Nightingales (1960; published in the United States in 1962), centers on a professor who leaves behind his life to live in Italy. It was followed by Bridgeport Bus (1965), told through journal-like entries about an Irish‑American woman who moves to New York City.

In 1978, she published Facts of Life, a memoir that won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Earlier, she had edited a book on American women writers (1977). Her subsequent novels, including Grace Abounding (1982), Expensive Habits (1986), and Natural History (1992), received PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction nominations.

Howard also wrote a quartet inspired by the seasons: A Lover’s Almanac (1998), The Silver Screen (2004), The Rags of Time (2009), and Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring (2001). The sequence received mixed critical reactions, but many praised its ambition and craft.

In 1993, Howard joined the School of the Arts at Columbia University, continuing her teaching career. Her work has been the subject of scholarly study, and her papers are housed at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Critics note her lyric, ironic style and her interest in Irish‑American identity, family, history, and religion, often using multiple narrators and nontraditional structures.

Howard was married three times and had one daughter, Loretta Howard. Her spouses were Daniel F. Howard (1954–1967), David J. Gordon (1968–1980s), and Mark Probst (1981–2018). Her brother, George Kearns, was a professor of literature, and her daughter Loretta runs an art gallery in New York.