Anne McCaffrey

Author

• Born: April 1, 1926
• Birthplace: Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Died: November 21, 2011

Biography

Anne McCaffrey was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 1, 1926, to George Herbert McCaffrey and Anne Dorothy McElroy McCaffrey. She had two brothers, Hugh and Kevin. The family moved around a lot during her childhood. McCaffrey was educated at Stuart Hall in Staunton, Virginia, and Montclair High School in New Jersey. She attended Radcliffe College, where she earned a B.A. cum laude in Slavonic languages and literature in1947.

After graduating, she became a character actress on the stage, appearing in the first successful summer music circus in Lambertsville, New Jersey. She studied voice for nine years and became very interested in the stage direction of operas and operettas, eventually directing the American premiere of Carl Orff’s Ludus de nato infante miricus, in which she also played a witch. She also performed in and directed several operas and musical comedies in Wilmington and Greenville, Delaware. Her interest in operas and operettas is reflected in one of her best-known novels, The Ship Who Sang; the book was originally written as a form of catharsis after the death of her father and was published in 1969.

In addition to her theater work, McCaffrey also was a copywriter and layout designer for Liberty Music Shops in New York City from 1948 until 1950, and a copywriter for Helena Rubinstein cosmetics from 1950 until 1952. In 1950, she married E. Wright Johnson, and the couple had three children, Alec Anthony, born in 1952, Todd, born in 1956, and Georgeanne, born in 1959. She was divorced in 1970, after which she immigrated to Ireland. Shortly after arriving in Ireland, she took over a thoroughbred horse and stud farm, and her horses have been successful in horse trials and show jumping events. McCaffrey eventually settled in a house of her own design, called Dragonhold-Underhill, in Wicklow County, Ireland.

McCaffrey began writing when she was twelve years old, the year she wrote her first novel during Latin lessons; she wrote a second novel in Latin. McCaffrey’s later resumed writing and her first acknowledged short story, “The Lady in the Tower,” about the concept of perfect pitch, was published in 1959. This story later became her novel The Rowan, published in 1990. McCaffrey has written more than fifty-four books, including collaborations with various authors, and more than fifty-four short stories. She has received seventeen awards for her writing, including the Margaret A Edwards Lifetime Literary Achievement Award in June, 1999.

Her first published novel, Restoree, appeared in 1967. She is probably best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series. “Weyr Search” (1967), the short story that initiated the series, won a Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1968. It was the first time a woman had won a Hugo for fiction. In the same year she won a Nebula Award for her novella Dragonrider; that book was later expanded into the novel Dragonflight (1968). Among her other awards, McCaffrey has received the Writers of the Future Life Time Achievement Award, the HOMer award, and the Science Fiction Book Club’s Book of the Year. Her 1978 novel The White Dragon was the first science- fiction novel to make The New York Times’s hardcover best-seller list. In 1980, she received a Balrog Award for her novel Dragondrums. McCaffrey was secretary-treasurer of Science Fiction Writers of America from1968 to 1970. At the 2005 Nebula Award ceremonies, McCaffrey was named the organization’s Twenty-Second Grand Master.