Anne
McCaffrey
Who
is Anne McCaffrey you ask?
Well..
She
is a Hugo and Nebula-award winning author with over 50 novels and short
stories, of which there are more than twelve million copies in print.
She
was born on April 1st at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her parents were George
Herbert McCaffrey, BA, MA PhD (Harvard), Colonel USA Army (retired), and
Anne Dorothy McElroy McCaffrey, estate agent. She has two brothers: Hugh
McCaffrey (deceased l988), Major US Army, and Kevin Richard McCaffrey,
still living.
Anne
was educated at Stuart Hall, Staunton Virginia, Montclair High School,
Montclair, New Jersey, and
graduated
cum laude from Radcliffe College, majoring in Slavonic Languages and Literatures.
She
married in 1950 and has three children: Alec Anthony, Todd, and Georgeanne.
She
wrote her first novel in Latin class and then turned to the stage and became
a character actress, appearing in
the
first successful summer music circus at Lambertville, New Jersey. She studied
voice for nine years and, during
that
time became intensely interested in the stage direction of opera and operetta.
She ended this phase of her life
with
the stage direction of the American premiere of Carl Orff's Ludus De Nato
Infante Mirificus, in which she also
played
a witch. Her working career included Liberty Music Shops and Helena Rubinstein
(l947-1952).
By
the time her three children were comfortably at school most of the day,
she had already achieved enough
success
with short stories to devote full time to writing. Anne McCaffrey's first
story was published by Sam
Moskowitz
in Science Fiction + Magazine and her first published novel was by Ballantine
Books in l967.
Her
first novel, Restoree, was written as a protest against the absurd and
unrealistic portrayals of women in Sci-Fi
novels
in the 50s and early 60s. It is, however, in the handling of broader themes
and the worlds of her imagination,
particularly
the two series, The Ship Who Sang and the fourteen novels about the Dragonriders
Of Pern that Ms.
McCaffrey's
talents as a story-teller are best displayed.
Although
she used to make frequent appearances throughout the world as a lecturer
and guest-of-honor at science
fiction
conventions, arthritis has now restricted such travel. Anne McCaffrey lives
in a house of her own design,
Dragonhold-Underhill,
in the hills of County Wicklow, Ireland, with assorted horses, cats, and
a dog. Of herself,
Ms.
McCaffrey says: "I have green eyes, silver hair, and freckles - the rest
changes without notice."
Credit for these gorgeous grapics goes to:
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