instagram pinterest linkedin facebook twitter goodreads

Biography

A writing life.

Born July 6, 1899 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Mignon Good received her degree from Nebraska Wesleyan University. new text

start new paragraph

Publishing her first novel Patient in Room 18 in 1929, Mignon Good Eberhart penned over 50 novels and numerous short stories, many of which have been adapted for film and television. In 1971, she received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She is also a past president of the Mystery Writers of America.

She began to write in her early teens, "mainly," she says, "because I preferred writing to studying Caesar's Commentaries and algebra. There was one halcyon period during which I traded work on English themes for the solution of geometry problems, with an obliging classmate, but, perhaps for the best, this was very brief. There was a long novel to which I could add chapters at will, and numerous plays, all of which were advisedly destroyed. In my early twenties I gathered up courage and postage stamps and sent a book-length typescript to an editor. It was accepted. The story was a murder mystery and thus started me on a hard but rewarding writing path. The writer hopes that a mystery novel is entertaining to read but it is not easy to write."