author

Mary Knight

1898–1996

A trailblazing journalist who later turned her wide travels and curiosity into fiction, she moved from international newsrooms to children's fantasy with unusual ease. Her life crossed Paris, the Far East, wartime government service, and a late return to school that led to a published book.

1 Audiobook

Red blight

Red blight

by Mary Knight

About the author

Mary Lamar Knight McConnell was an American journalist, author, and lecturer born in 1898. Emory University's description of her papers says she was the daughter of Georgia historian Lucian Lamar Knight, earned her undergraduate degree from Agnes Scott College in 1922, and later completed a degree in librarianship at San Jose State in 1968.

According to the same archive record, she was one of the first women news correspondents for United Press International and the first woman on its Paris staff, serving there from 1930 to 1935. After traveling in the Far East, she worked in the U.S. Office of War Censorship through the end of World War II, experiences that suggest a life shaped by reporting, travel, and close contact with world events.

Her archive also notes that her librarianship thesis, "The Chinese Fox," became the children's fantasy The Fox that Wanted Nine Golden Tails, published in 1969 and earlier issued in Tokyo in 1955 under the Japanese name Kishi Mariko. A family memorial listing cited in search results gives her lifespan as 1899–1996, so the 1898 birth year sometimes attached to her appears to be uncertain.