Learn About Faith McNulty on good-read.club

Faith McNulty

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Born: November 27 1918

Died: 0909 04 20052005

Faith McNulty was an American nonfiction author, probably best-known for her 1980 book The Burning Bed. She was born "Faith Corrigan" in New York City, the daughter of a judge. Young Faith attended Barnard College for one year, then attended Rhode Island State College. But she dropped out of college once she got a job as a copy girl at the New York Daily News. She later went to work for Life magazine. She worked for the U.S. Office of War Information in London during World War II.

McNulty was a wildlife writer at The New Yorker magazine for several years. In 1980, a collection of her New Yorker work was published as The Wildlife Stories of Faith McNulty. For many years, she edited the annual New Yorker compilation of the year's best children's books.

She also frequently wrote children's books on wildlife, including How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World in 1979 and When I Lived with Bats in 1998. Her 1966 book The Whooping Crane: The Bird that Defies Distinction was written for adults.

Her husband, John McNulty, was also a writer for The New Yorker and with Thomas Wolf, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese, a major figure in the development of the literary genre of creative nonfiction, which is also known as literary journalism or literature in fact. After her husband died in 1956, she remarried, to Richard Martin, a set designer and an inventive designer of set props.

The Burning Bed told the true story of Francine Hughes, who set fire to the bedroom in which her husband was sleeping. Hughes defended herself by saying that her husband had been abusing her for 13 years. The jury at her trial ruled that she had been temporarily insane, and she was found not guilty.

"I can remember my father in his nightshirt, digging for worms for the baby robin in the bathroom. That's the kind of household it was; I had woodchucks in the bathroom, cats, squirrels, chipmunks," McNulty once said.

Toward the end of her life, she wrote a weekly column for The Providence Journal on a local animal shelter run by the Animal Welfare League. Her mother had founded the Animal Welfare League in southern Rhode Island. McNulty had long been known for taking in stray animals at her farm.

She suffered a stroke in 2004. She died at her farm in Wakefield, Rhode Island.

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Popular Genres

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Faith McNulty

Faith McNulty

Books from Faith McNulty

The Burning Bed: The True Story of an Abused Wife

If You Decide to Go to the Moon

How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World

Arty The Smarty

This Place on Third Avenue

Dancing with Manatees

If Dogs Ruled the World (Level 3)

The Lady and the Spider

How Whales Walked into the Sea

Mouse and Tim

Endangered Animals (level 3)

When I Lived with Bats

Listening to Whales Sing

Peeping in the Shell: A Whooping Crane Is Hatched

A Snake in the House

The Silly Story of a Flea and His Dog

Hurricane

The Whooping Crane: The Bird That Defies Extinction

Playing with Dolphins