The Life and Work of Mary O'Hara, Author of My Friend Flicka

Mary O'Hara has received limited attention as a writer of children's books, but this is the first volume to regard her as a serious writer of adult fiction. Her works are subtle and sensitive studies of human emotions and family dynamics. Her most ambitious novel, The Son of Adam Wyngate, dramatizes the personal, intellectual and spiritual life of a turn-of-the-century Episcopal mystic and priest. She also published non-fiction books based on her writer's journals and personal diaries. This study also examines her extremely diverse careers in other fields (Hollywood scriptwriting, dairy-farming in Wyoming, writing/composing/orchestrating a musical play); her personal life (marriages and moves from East to West to East and the Rocky Mountain Divide); and her spiritual life, from Episcopalian origins through Christian Science to theosophical cults of California in the twenties and thirties, to her final home in the Roman Catholic Church.