Author Biography and Bibliography

Born in the Year of the Fire Tiger on April first, which was Holy Thursday in 1926, Anne McCaffrey has more than lived up to the auspices of her natal day.

She wrote her first novel in Latin class—a highly romantic fantasy, Eleutheria the Dancing Slave Girl. (There are no extant copies.) It is no surprise, then, that she majored in Slavonic Languages and Literatures at Radcliffe and graduated cum laude. Working as an advertising copywriter until her marriage in 1970, she continued to read everything that was printed, including science fiction, to which she developed a passionate attachment. When sf novels were not published fast enough in the '50s, she started writing them herself. Not, initially, a success story.

First published by the late Sam Moskowitz in l954, she paused to have two more children before addressing the keyboard of her portable Olympia. When her daughter started school full time in l965, she had enough free hours to write her first full novel, which Betty Ballantine published: a send-up of the portrayal of women in science fiction.

In the living room of her Sea Cliff, Long Island home during May of l967, she conceived the notion of dragons partnered for life with empathic humans, and Pern was born! Since John Campbell, the estimable editor of Analog, encouraged her to continue, she has never left her keyboard for very long.

Immigrating to Ireland in l970 with two of her three children and her mother, she has enjoyed horses and been owned by Maine Coon cats, has four grandchildren and breaks computer keyboards with astonishing regularity. Having traveled extensively for three decades, conventioning and lecturing, she feels that it is time to enjoy Dragonhold-Underhill to the fullest. (The house is not a castle but a modern, designed-by-user home.)

Her hair is still silver, her eyes are still green, and the changes are now noticeable.





Photograph by Orla Callahan.