Daly regularly published work for over five decades, starting in the 1930s when she was still in high school. Although she is best known for the fiction she wrote as a teenager, most of her career was spent as a journalist and writer of non-fiction. In the 1960s, she wrote several books for young children.
"Sixteen" and Seventeenth Summer Daly was encouraged to write by her high school English teacher. At age 15, Daly entered her short story titled "Fifteen" in a competition sponsored by
Scholastic; the story placed third. The following year, when Daly was 16, she won first prize in the same
Scholastic competition with her story "Sixteen" about a girl who meets a boy at a skating rink. "Sixteen" also received an
O. Henry Award in 1938, and it was published in at least 300 anthologies and in 12 languages. Daly said in a 1986 interview that she was still receiving royalty checks for the story. Daly began writing
Seventeenth Summer, her first novel, when she was 17, but did not finish it until several years later; she completed it while attending Rosary College. She entered it in an intercollegiate novel contest sponsored by publisher
Dodd, Mead and won first prize. The novel, about a 17-year-old girl's experience of first love during one summer, was published by Dodd in 1942 while Daly was still in college. It drew critical praise, including an essay by
Orville Prescott in
The New York Times placing Daly in a group of literary "Rising Stars" alongside
Eudora Welty,
Nelson Algren,
Howard Fast,
Mary O'Hara and others.
Seventeenth Summer became a bestseller, remaining continuously in print for over six decades and selling over 1 million copies by the time of Daly's death in 2006. It received a
Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1969.
Seventeenth Summer has been credited with beginning the modern period of young adult literature, although at the time of its publication, young adult fiction was not recognized as a category (and would not be so recognized until the 1960s), and
Seventeenth Summer originally was published as a novel for adults. A survey taken in the 1940s ranked the book as the third most popular with teenage readers, behind
Gone with the Wind and
Jane Eyre.
Journalism career, marriage, and travel Despite the success of
Seventeenth Summer, Daly did not write another novel for 44 years, choosing to pursue a journalism career. Daly explained in later interviews that she did not know
Seventeenth Summer would be so successful and she needed a secure job in order to help support her mother and sisters, her father having died in 1944. She had gained journalism experience while in college, including writing an advice column for teenagers that appeared in the
Chicago Tribune and was syndicated to other newspapers. Her advice columns later were collected in a book titled
Smarter and Smoother: A Handbook on How to Be That Way (1944). After graduating from Rosary College, she joined the
Tribune as a police beat reporter as well as continued her advice column. She left in 1945 to become an associate editor for ''Ladies' Home Journal
. Daly wrote a series of articles on teenagers for Ladies' Home Journal
that were gathered in the book Profile of Youth'' (1951). In 1952, she won a
Freedoms Foundation Award for "humanity in journalism" for her article "City Girl", which profiled an African-American girl living in Chicago. Daly met
William P. McGivern, Bill, at a book signing event for
Seventeenth Summer in 1942, and corresponded with him during
World War II. They married in 1946 and initially lived in Philadelphia. For the first 10 years of their marriage, Daly was the primary breadwinner while McGivern, who later became a successful author and screenwriter, built his career. In 1950, the couple decided to become freelance writers, move to Europe with their young daughter, and travel around the world, and Daly resigned her editor position with ''Ladies' Home Journal
. As a freelancer, Daly sent articles to the U.S. for publication, including interviews with Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. Daly (as Maureen McGivern) and her husband later co-wrote Mention My Name in Mombasa; the Unscheduled Adventures of an American Family Abroad'' (1958), a memoir of their travels during this time to France, Spain, Gibraltar, Iceland, Belgium, Morocco, Nigeria, and Ireland. By the early 1960s, the McGiverns had returned to the United States, settling first in Pennsylvania and later in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, where Bill McGivern worked as a television and film writer. Daly served as an editorial consultant for
The Saturday Evening Post from 1960 to 1969. In 1961,
Sixteen and Other Stories, a collection of her short stories, was published. Between 1959 and the late 1960s, she wrote a number of story books for young children. In the early 1970s, the family moved to Palm Desert, California.
Later novels and career Daly said that, over the years, she had turned down many requests to write a new novel or a sequel to
Seventeenth Summer and that her failure to write a follow-up had led some teachers and librarians to think she was dead. However, Daly was motivated to write two more novels after her husband Bill McGivern and their adult daughter Megan both died of cancer within one year of each other in the early 1980s. To cope with the losses, Daly wrote the young adult novel
Acts of Love (1986), basing the protagonist Retta Caldwell on her daughter Megan and the plot on events that had happened to Megan as a teenager. She published the sequel
First a Dream in 1990. Starting in 1988 and continuing into the 1990s, Daly was a long-term columnist for
The Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, California, writing food and restaurant reviews. ==Personal life and death==