Mary Starke Harper - Tuscaloosa AL 35401

Mary Starke Harper, born in 1917, was an American writer who was most famous for her romance novels. Her work was noted for its strong character development, and many of her books won the prestigious National Book Award. Her final novel, “The Princess of Mars” was written under difficult circumstances and ended with a death.\n\n \n\nMary’s biographical information is scarce. A short biography by the author of “The Princess of Mars,” a biographical account, states that Starke Harper was an Irish Catholic who later married and divorced several times. Her last husband, William J. Taylor, died in an airplane crash and Starke remained unmarried for many years. She lived in the San Francisco Bay area and later in California.\n\n \n\nMary Starke Harper is one of those women who were part of a time when being female was considered to be less-than-respectable. The term “hunk” was not used to describe men at the time, although some men did use it. The first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the French author Isabelle Neilson, was also referred to as “the hunk.” Although Starke Harper may have been called that, she may have had other meanings for which that description would have been appropriate. If so, her work deserves recognition as important and original.