Myra Kelly

Born in Dublin on August 26, 1875, she moved to New York as a child and later studied at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart and the New York State Normal College. She taught in New York City schools, and that classroom experience became the heart of her writing.

Her best-known books include Little Citizens, Wards of Liberty, and Little Aliens, collections of stories about immigrant children and everyday life in the public schools. Readers and critics valued the way she combined comedy, sympathy, and close observation, turning ordinary classroom moments into lively fiction.

She married Allan McNaughton in 1905 and died in Torquay, England, on March 30, 1910. Though her life was short, her work remains a vivid literary record of immigrant New York and the children who filled its classrooms.