Phyllis McGinley
McGinley was educated at the University of Southern California and at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. After receiving her diploma in 1927, she taught for a year in Ogden and then at a junior high school in New Rochelle, New York. Once she had begun to establish a reputation for herself as a writer, McGinley gave up teaching and moved to New York City, where she held various jobs. She married Charles Hayden in 1937, and the couple moved to Larchmont, New York. The suburban landscape and culture of her new home was to provide the subject matter of much of McGinley's work.
McGinley was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. She was the first writer to win the Pulitzer for her light verse collection, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades with Seventy New Poems (1960).
In addition to poetry, McGinley wrote essays and children's books, as well as the lyrics for the 1948 musical revue Small Wonder.
“Gossip isn't scandal and its not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same”
“Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly but passé. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.”
“Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy”
“Ah, snug lie those that slumber beneath conviction's roof.Their floors are sturdy lumber, their windows weatherproof.But I sleep cold forever, and cold sleep all my kind,For I was born to shiver in the draft from an open mind.Born nakedly to shiver in the draft of an open mind.”
“A mother's hardest to forgive.Life is the fruit she longs to hand youRipe on a plate. And while you live,Relentlessly she understands you.”
“A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.”
“God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.”