Muriel Spark

(1918 - 2006)

Muriel Spark wrote propaganda for the British Foreign Office in World War II and served as editor of The Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949. With financial support from Graham Greene, she published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. Although she was a famous author in both Great Britain and the United States for the better part of forty years, she shunned speaking events and questions about her private life. Her aloofness excited strong public interest, and when her autobiography Curriculum Vitae was published in 1992, it became an immediate best seller. The author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993. Spark died in Florence in 2006 at the age of eighty-eight.