This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 1 April 1926, United States
Died: 21 November 2011
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
McCaffrey, Anne Inez (1926–2011), science fiction and fantasy writer, was born on 1 April 1926 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, the second child and only daughter of George Herbert McCaffrey (1890–1954), soldier and administrator, and his wife Anne Dorothy (née McElroy), who worked in real estate and advertising copywriting. Both parents were of Irish descent. After serving in the US army in the first world war, her father worked in city planning and as director of the Merchants’ Association of New York (1928–50). A US army lieutenant-colonel in the second world war, he was military governor of Palermo in 1943. He later worked in Japan with the American occupying authorities, in Poland while a post-war provisional government was being established, and in Korea as head of the financial section of the UN administration commission.
Anne boarded in Stuart Hall School, Staunton, Virginia (1942–3), and graduated from Montclair High School, New Jersey (1944). In 1947 she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College, having majored in Slavonic languages; she had also studied Celtic folklore and Chinese philosophy. She developed a great interest in theatre and especially in opera, and had a good singing voice with an unusual vocal range. After moving to New York city, she had various jobs (1948–52), as a copywriter and publicist for a music store, and a copywriter and secretary in Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics firm.
On 14 January 1950 she married Horace Wright Johnson, who worked in public relations for Du Pont. Her life seemed set to conform to the 1950s American norms of suburban housewife and mother: she had two sons, in 1952 and 1956, and a daughter in 1959. The family spent six months in Dusseldorf, Germany, in 1963, and lived in various US cities, including Wilmington, Delaware, where Du Pont had headquarters. While living there, Anne studied stage direction, and directed musical productions in local theatres, but was increasingly interested in writing science fiction short stories. At the time, the genre was very much in vogue, as post-war optimism and pressure to conform were increasingly threatened by technological and scientific change. She published her first story in 1953, and several more in the following years, before turning full time to writing in 1965, when the family was living in Sea Cliff, Long Island, NY.
Her first full-length novel, Restoree, appeared in 1967 over her own name, Anne McCaffrey, keeping her work separate from her identity as a married woman. Restoree was an original contribution to the genre, intentionally showcasing a competent and heroic female as the main character. This innovation, and McCaffrey’s imaginative settings, richly worked language and skilful plotting brought her to notice. With a literary agent and publishing contracts came publicity, awards, fans and appearances at science fiction conventions, all further straining her marriage, which was already in difficulties.
In August 1970, McCaffrey filed for divorce and took her two younger children to Dublin, seeking educational opportunities and a less expensive lifestyle. Although she was aware of the tax break for authors recently introduced by Minister for Finance Charles Haughey, her financial situation was so straitened that she scarcely envisaged any serious tax liability. Her ability to write rapidly and spin gripping yarns soon produced a couple of modern gothic romances, written expressly to make money, and later regarded with some embarrassment by her fans. The family’s first years in Ireland were difficult; McCaffrey’s mother joined them, but died in 1974 after suffering strokes, and McCaffrey had to adjust to the constraints of a conservative society. Even after she was making enough money to seek a mortgage, in 1976 she was annoyed to find that, as a single mother, she had to get a male friend to stand surety with the bank before she could buy her own house.
The urgent need to support her household, which eventually included her former husband’s sister, led McCaffrey to produce a stream of novellas and short stories, published in genre magazines and often combined in various ways into later publications with different publishers, leading to a complicated bibliography. In 1967 she had published the novellas Weyr search and Dragonrider, which became the nucleus of McCaffrey’s most ambitious and popular series of books, about the earth-settled planet Pern and the people and dragons who together fought off a threat to their existence.
McCaffrey took pride in basing her fictions on current scientific knowledge; she consulted experts, took courses in physics, and studied meteorology in Dublin City University. Her detailed delineation of a fantasy world, where dragons and people were connected telepathically, and where romance and sexuality were more than hinted at, was a winning combination of something reminiscent of the ‘horse-and-girl’ type stories that appealed to younger teenagers, merged with the invented world tropes that appealed to older readers.
After the first Pern novel, Dragonflight, appeared in 1968, others rapidly followed. The third hardback book in the series, The white dragon (1978), featured on the New York Times hardback bestseller list, and all of the Pern books sold well. The dozens of Dragonriders of Pern books published in the forty-five years from 1967 until McCaffrey’s death explored various phases of the invented history of Pern and introduced a multitude of characters. The imagined world gave rise to a cottage industry of Pern encyclopaedias and gazetteers, and ultimately also to a bewilderingly complex internet-based sub-world of fan fiction, game names, avatars, interactive forums, artworks and illustrations, and scholarly exegesis. Devoted fans accorded McCaffrey the status of a Pern Earthmother. She was regularly the guest of honour at fan conventions in the US and Britain and, until she became frail in later years, was delighted to meet fans, even when they turned up at her door. In later years, McCaffrey or her assistants developed a strong online presence, in blogs and forums. Her son Todd published a memoir of his mother, with her own reminiscences and family photographs, as Dragonholder: the life and dreams (so far) of Anne McCaffrey (1999; revised ebook, 2014). The surprisingly frank interviews she granted to author Robin Roberts probably provided some of the gossipy and even salacious stories relayed in Roberts’s biography, Anne McCaffrey: a life with dragons (2007), but McCaffrey made the best of things by welcoming the book on its publication.
Fans and publishers constantly clamoured for more of McCaffrey’s work. Her inventive skill and constant effort produced more than a dozen other science-fiction series, all containing at least three novels, and sometimes seven volumes or more. The worlds of the Brain and Brawn Ship series and the Crystal series rival Pern’s complexity with arguably more developed characters. Faced with demands for new work, McCaffrey collaborated with other writers to turn out contractually-promised new books. Even her agent apparently referred to this practice as ‘sharecropping’, but McCaffrey claimed that she was helping younger writers get established in the business. In her latter career, her son Todd (who as an adult took the name McCaffrey in place of Johnson) was a major co-author and, after his mother died, published Dragonrider books and other related stories over his own name.
Anne McCaffrey also published stand-alone novels and short-story collections, as well as a couple of cookbooks (1973 and 1996) and romantic fiction, some featuring Irish settings and characters, but not particularly memorable. Four books for children appeared (1995–8), featuring horses, one of her abiding passions. She bought a horse in Ireland as soon as she could afford to do so, and when her family moved to rural Co. Wicklow they owned several horses and for a time a livery stable, stud and riding school. The second house she built, outside Newcastle, Co. Wicklow, was an impressive and idiosyncratic mansion, featuring dragon motifs and named ‘Dragonhold-Underhill’.
McCaffrey was one of the most prolific and successful authors ever to have worked in Ireland. Her books fill entire shelves in bookshops, in various languages round the world, and some of her earliest works were still in print fifty years later. Her first million-dollar contract was secured as far back as 1993. The sheer volume of her writings and her cheerfully overt commercial intentions led some critics to regard her work more as a cultural phenomenon than significant literature.
However, fans generally welcomed every new story ecstatically, and McCaffrey was accorded much genuine respect by other science fiction and fantasy authors, many of whom had discovered the genre through her writing. The winner of Science Fiction Book Club Awards in 1986, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993 and 1994, she was the first woman to hold both of the two premier science fiction awards for best novella: the 1968 Hugo Award, for Weyr search; and the 1969 Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America, for Dragonrider. The first science fiction writer to receive the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards lifetime achievement award for outstanding literature for young adults (1999), she was made a grand master of science fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (2005) and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Seattle (2006). Other honours included the Golden Pen Award (1981), the British Science Fiction Association’s Cthulhu Award (2000), the Karl Edward Wagner special award in the British Fantasy Awards (2000), and the Robert A. Heinlein Award (2007).
McCaffrey’s poetry featured on CDs of music specially composed to suggest the music of her fantasy universe, where singing played important roles, and her novels directly inspired several computer games and artworks. Film and television adaptations were discussed, but did not get into production.
After suffering several heart attacks over several years, Anne McCaffrey died of a stroke on 21 November 2011 at home in Co. Wicklow, survived by her children. She was buried at Kilquade New Cemetery, Co. Wicklow.