Faith McNulty (1918–2005)

Faith McNulty, née Corrigan, was born in New York City and spent her childhood summers on her grandmother's farm in Wakefield, Rhode Island. She attended Barnard College for one year, then Rhode Island State College. However, she dropped out of college after getting a job as a copy girl at the New York Daily News. She later worked for Life magazine. During World War II, she worked for the U.S. Office of War Information in London.

She became a staff writer at The New Yorker, a position she held from 1953 to 1994. In 1980, a collection of her New Yorker pieces was published as The Wildlife Stories of Faith McNulty.

She also wrote numerous books on animals and country life for children and adults, including How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World (1979), When I Lived With Bats (1998), and The Whooping Crane: The Bird that Defies Distinction (1966).
In 1945, she married
John McNulty, also a writer and journalist, with whom she had a son. Along with Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, and James Baldwin, Faith McNulty became a major figure in the development of the "creative nonfiction" genre, also called "New Journalism" or literary journalism. Her most famous book, The Burning Bed, published in 1980, was a prime example. It was based on the true story of Francine Hughes, who in 1977 set fire to the bedroom in which her husband was sleeping, claiming he had been abusing her for 13 years. The jury at her trial found her not guilty.
The book was adapted into a 1994 NBC-TV movie. Towards the end of her life, Faith wrote a weekly column for The Providence Journal on a local animal shelter run by the Animal Welfare League. Her last book was If You Decide to Go to the Moon (2005), a children's picture book illustrated by Steven Kellogg, which won the Boston Globe's Horn Book Award for Nonfiction.