author
Owen Kildare
1864–1911
Raised in New York and drawn to the city’s hardest streets, this early 20th-century writer turned life in the slums into vivid fiction and memoir. His work is closely linked with stories of poverty, survival, and personal reinvention.
1 Audiobook
My Mamie Rose: The Story of My Regeneration
by Owen Kildare
About the author
Owen Kildare, born Owen Frawley Kildare in New York on June 11, 1864, was an American writer whose novels and short stories focused on the harsh realities of tenement and slum life. He is especially remembered for writing about lower Manhattan with unusual directness, bringing readers into a world of poverty, crime, and struggle.
His best-known book is My Mamie Rose: The Story of My Regeneration (1903), an autobiographical work that helped make his name. Sources also describe him as a journalist and magazine editor, and his writing was often shaped by his own account of growing up in difficult circumstances.
Kildare died on February 4, 1911. Though he is not widely read today, his work still stands as a striking literary record of urban life in New York at the turn of the century.