Mary O'Hara

Mary O’Hara Alsop, an American author, screenwriter, and composer, was born July 10, 1885, in Cape May, N.J., to Reese Fell Alsop and Mary Lee (Spring). She grew up in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., where her father was an Episcopal clergyman.

In 1905, Ms. O'hara married Kent Kane Parrot, whom she later divorced. Her second marriage to Helge Sture-Vasa from Sweden in 1922 also ended in divorce in 1947. Ms. O’Hara had two children from her first marriage, Mary O’Hara who died of skin cancer during her teens, and Kent Kane, Jr.

Ms. O’Hara moved to California after her first marriage where she became a screenwriter during the silent film era through the advent of talking movies.

In 1930, during her second marriage, Ms O’Hara moved to a ranch in Wyoming where she wrote her three novels, the classic “My Friend Flicka,” and the sequels “Thunderhead” and “Green Grass of Wyoming,” about the McLaughlin family and the younger son and his horse, Flicka.

In addition to writing, Ms O’Hara was a successful composer and published numerous songs for the piano. She also wrote a musical play called "The Catch Colt" which she later turned into a novel, first published in 1979 in Great Britain. The rights to performing this as a play or a musical can still be obtained through Dramatists Play Services, New York.

While she claimed her first love was musical composition, she continued writing fiction and nonfiction.

A year after her divorce from her second husband in 1947, Ms O’Hara returned to the east coast where she lived in Connecticut until 1968. She died Oct. 14, 1980, in Chevy Chase, Md. Her literary works are maintained by Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

(sources: Current Biography, 1944; Contemporary Authors, 1981)