Mary O'Hara Alsop

Background

Mary O'Hara Alsop was born on July 10, 1885 in Cape May Point, New Jersey, United States, one of four children of Reverend Reese Fell Alsop, an Episcopal clergyman, and Mary Lee Spring. She was a descendant of Jonathan Edwards and William Penn.

Education

Alsop was educated at the Packer Institute near her home in Brooklyn Heights, New York, and at the Ingleside School in New Milford, Connecticut. She also studied music and languages in Europe for several years.

Career

Alsop worked for several Hollywood silent film companies as a reader and a script and continuity writer. Her most successful adaptations and script continuities were Toilers of the Sea (1923), Black Oxen (1924), Turn to the Right (1927), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1927). During this period, Alsop began restudying music, taking lessons in both piano and composition. In addition, she explored Hindu mysticism and a variety of religious philosophies under the tutelage of George Edwin Burnell. The Remount Ranch, where she lived with her secon husband, was the inspiration for several of Alsop's novels, which she began publishing after leaving the film industry. Most of Alsop's works were printed under her pen name, Mary O'Hara.

Her breakthrough as a writer occurred in the summer of 1940 when, at age fifty-five, she traveled to New York City and took an extension course in writing at Columbia University. Through this class, she made contacts in the literary world that led to the publication of her most successful novel, the best-seller My Friend Flicka (1941). The novel, a story of a boy and his horse, was immensely popular and eventually was printed in fourteen foreign-language editions. It was the first of a trilogy that also included Thunderhead (1943) and Green Grass of Wyoming (1946). The main characters of the first novel are a ten-year-old boy and his beloved wild horse, Flicka, who live on a Wyoming ranch.

Alsop explores the dynamics of family relationships as the young boy finds both conflict with his strong-willed, military-trained father and understanding from his artistic, sensitive mother. The difficulties of ranch life and family relationships and a boy's love for spirited horses are continuing themes of the trilogy's second and third novels, as the boy matures into a young man of seventeen. Critics praised the author for her skillful, vivid use of imagery and her sensitive character portrayals. Twentieth Century-Fox produced film versions of each of the novels (1943, 1945, and 1948), and in 1957, an ABC-TV series was based on My Friend Flicka.

In 1948 year she returned to the East to make her home near Monroe, Connecticut. While Alsop was writing film scripts, novels, and short stories, she also was producing musical compositions. Throughout her life she enjoyed playing the piano daily and once wrote that she believed "Music was my true vocation and writing merely an avocation but when the inspiration for a story seized me, I would decide it was the other way around, and writing was my vocation. "

Among the better-known of her many early musical compositions for piano were "Esperan" (1943), "May God Keep You" (1946), "Wyoming Suite for Piano" (1946), and "Windharp. " After reaching what most would consider retirement age, Alsop wrote five more books, each very intimate in the way it reflected different aspects of her life and personality. The Son of Adam Wyngate (1952) drew on some of the mysticism and religious philosophies she had explored; Novel-in-the-Making (1954), on the art of writing a book, was her first autobiography; Wyoming Summer (1963), a fictionalized adaptation of her summer diary written many years earlier, reintroduced Western themes while also revealing her personal insights on life; and A Musical in the Making (1966) was an intimate account of nine years of her trials and tribulations in creating a musical. She also wrote a play, The Catch Colt (1964), for which she composed the musical score. This folk musical was first produced at Catholic University of America under the title Oh, Wyoming! and later at Lincoln Theatre, Cheyenne, Wyoming, where it was called Top O' the Big Hill. In 1979, The Catch Colt was published as a novella.

In the early 1970s Alsop moved to the Washington, D. C. , area to be near her son, who was assisting her as agent and public relations adviser for her musical. She died of arteriosclerosis in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at the age of ninety-five.

Achievements

• Alsop became a prolific and famous female writer and composer of her time. She wrote nine books and composed a folk musical, "The Catch Colt, " which was performed in 1961 at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. , and at the Lincoln Theatre in Cheyenne, Wyoming. O'Hara also published her account of writing, composing and producing the musical, "A Musical in the Making. "

Works

More photos

• book

  • My Friend Flicka

    ( The first time that ken McLaughlin sees Flicka gallopin...)

  • Wyoming summer

    (Documentary novel based on the author"s journal while liv...)

  • Thunderhead

    (A follow-up to the childhood classic My Friend Flicka. "T...)

  • Novel-in-the-Making

    (First edition. Self-portrait of an author at work. iv , 2...)

  • Flicka's friend: The autobiography of Mary O'Hara

    (Vintage book)

  • Green Grass Of Wyoming

Views

Quotations: "I was destined to be a writer. I might almost say predestined, for I wrote my first short story when I was seven. As soon as it was finished I wrote another, and since then have never stopped writing. "

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "In Miss O'Hara, I believe, we have one of the most important and most enduring novelists now writing in America. Timeless tales like hers will always find a new public awaiting them as fast as new generations who like children and like horses grow up enough to read them. " - Orville Prescott

Connections

In October 1905, Alsop married a distant cousin, Elisha Kent Kane Parrot, a car salesman who later became a lawyer and political figure; they had two children. The couple divorced in 1916.

In August 1922, Alsop married Helge Sture-Vasa, a Swede whom she had met at a film studio. In the 1930s the couple purchased and moved to a Wyoming horse-breeding and dairy ranch, which they operated as a boy's camp in the summer in order to supplement the family income.

In the early 1940s, having failed to achieve economic success in ranching, Alsop and her husband sold their Wyoming property and moved to Santa Barbara, California. In 1947 they were divorced and Alsop legally resumed her maiden name.

Father:

Reese Fell Alsop

Mother:

Mary Lee (Spring) Alsop

Spouse:

Helge Sture-Vasa

Spouse:

Elisha Kent Kane Parrot

Brother:

Reese Denny Alsop

Sister:

Guielma Fell Alsop

Sister:

Elizabeth Febiger (Alsop) Shepard

Daughter:

Mary O'Hara Parrot

Son:

Kay (Kent) Parrot