I was so anxious to impress, I put my finger on the side of the stove to show him how long I could stand to sizzle. I'd scrimped to save for treats and, feeling very elegant, served us Ritz crackers with Cheeze-Whiz (the big jar!) and vienna sausages. We sprawled in front of the wood-stove and read all day and long into the night. During a winter holiday sleep-over, he smuggled Dragonsong and some of its many sequels to me. We both lived in religious households that discouraged 'worldly' reading but, while my folks were strict, his were lax. The best friend of my childhood was different from me in many ways: middle-class to my trailer-trash, older, weak where I was strong (he suffered from a heart condition that would kill him while still a teenager), and part of a large and functioning family. Fortunately, Dragonsong is also a very good book of its type. She died at the age of 85, after suffering a massive stroke on 21 November 2011.Ī book doesn't have to be Great Literature or even particularly good to appear on my 'formative fiction' shelf, it just has to be a book with a meaning that changed me or helped me to understand myself and the world in a new way. McCaffrey’s talents as a story-teller are best displayed. 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. Her first novel, Restoree, was written as a protest against the absurd and unrealistic portrayals of women in s-f novels in the 50s and early 60s. By the time the three children of her marriage were comfortably in school most of the day, she had already achieved enough success with short stories to devote full time to writing.

1952, Todd, b.1956, and Georgeanne, b.1959.Īnne McCaffrey’s first story was published by Sam Moskowitz in Science Fiction + Magazine and her first novel was published by Ballantine Books in 1967. She married in 1950 and had three children: Alec Anthony, b. Her working career included Liberty Music Shops and Helena Rubinstein (1947-1952).

She had two brothers: Hugh McCaffrey (deceased 1988), Major US Army, and Kevin Richard McCaffrey, still living.Īnne was educated at Stuart Hall in Staunton Virginia, Montclair High School in Montclair, New Jersey, and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College, majoring in Slavonic Languages and Literatures. Her parents were George Herbert McCaffrey, BA, MA PhD (Harvard), Colonel USA Army (retired), and Anne Dorothy McElroy McCaffrey, estate agent. Anne McCaffrey was born on April 1st, 1926, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dragonsong book