Literary Birthday – 12 August – Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mary Roberts Rinehart was born on 12 August 1876 and died on 22 September 1958.

Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotes

1. The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.
2. The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.
3. My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader’s interest.
4. Conflict is the very essence of life.
5. We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.
6. There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller’s shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.
7. There is no truly honest autobiography.

Source for quotes: A-Z Quotes

Mary Roberts Rinehart was an American novelist and playwright best known for her mystery stories. She became one of the most successful mystery writers of her time and was sometimes called the ‘American Agatha Christie’. Rinehart’s first novel, The Circular Staircase, was published in 1908 and became an immediate success. Her next novel, The Man in Lower Ten, helped establish her reputation, and she went on to write about one book a year. Her mysteries often combined murder with romance, humour, suspense, and clever twists. She is also associated with the phrase ‘the butler did it’. Rinehart’s success did not always fit easily with the domestic expectations placed on women at the time. She was a wife and mother, but she also worked as a war correspondent for The Saturday Evening Post during World War I. Rinehart published her memoir, My Story, in 1931 and revised it in 1948. She received a special award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1958, a year after publishing her final novel, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by George Washington University. By the time of her death in 1958, her books had sold more than 10 million copies.

Source for photograph: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

by Amanda Patterson
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