Mary Higgins Clark
Author
Born: Dec. 24, 1927, in New York City
Lived in: Washington Township and Saddle River, New Jersey
Died: Jan. 31, 2020, in Naples, Florida
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2011: Arts & Entertainment
It took six years of trying and 40 rejections before Mary Higgins Clark sold her first short story for $100 in 1956. After that, she had no place to go but up–way up. It was at times a slow and painful climb, but Higgins Clark ultimately wrote more than 50 novels, selling millions of copies around the world.
The daughter of an Irish immigrant father and an Irish American mother, Higgins Clark grew up during the Great Depression. She was not yet 12 when her father died. Her widowed mother resorted to babysitting and renting out rooms in the family home to feed Mary and her two siblings.
Amid the hard times, Higgins Clark began to write. She composed her first poems and short plays at the age of seven. Attending a Catholic academy, she was encouraged to continue with her writing. After high school, she worked as a secretary and as an airline stewardess for Pan Am to help support her family.
After a year of flying, Higgins Clark married and began to study writing at NYU. For one class assignment, she used her flying experiences to inform a story about a stewardess who finds a stowaway on her plane. That was the story that brought Higgins Clark her first $100 check as a writer.
Higgins Clark continued to sell her stories, even as she was raising four children. When her husband became too ill to earn a living, Higgins Clark accepted a job writing scripts for a radio program titled “Portrait of a Patriot.” That’s when tragedy struck again. Higgins Clark, now with five children, was widowed at the age of 36. Financially strapped, she took on more scriptwriting work.
Higgins Clark’s first attempt at a full-length novel, “Aspire to the Heavens,” was a fictionalized account of the relationship between George and Martha Washington. The book went nowhere, so she tried her hand at a suspense novel. In “Where Are the Children?”–published in 1975—she told the story of a young mother who is accused of killing her son and daughter. It became a bestseller and her career blasted off from there.
Having found her métier, Higgins Clark became a perennial best-selling author. Informally crowned “The Queen of Suspense,” she earned millions of fans (and millions of dollars) with her relatable tales of women in distress. She also tried her hand at other genres, including a children’s book and a series of Christmas-themed crime novels co-written with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark, now a fellow member of the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Higgins Clark also was notable for her philanthropy. She was especially devoted to Catholic causes, including schools and other charities. She has many church-affiliated awards, as well as numerous awards for her writing.
Many of Higgins Clark’s novels were set in New Jersey. She and her first husband moved to Washington Township in Bergen County in 1956; she later settled in Saddle River. At her New Jersey Hall of Fame induction ceremony, she acknowledged the Garden State as fertile ground for her work, declaring, “I was blessed to cross the George Washington Bridge all those years ago.”