Nancy Mars Freedman (July 4, 1920, in

Evanston, Illinois Evanston is a city in Cook County, Illinois, United States, situated on the North Shore (Chicago), North Shore along Lake Michigan. A suburb of Chicago, Evanston is north of Chicago Loop, downtown Chicago, bordered by Chicago to the south, Skok ...

– August 10, 2010, in Greenbrae, California) was an American

feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living wage, living writing novels and other fiction, while other ...

, the co-author of '' Mrs. Mike''..

Life

Upbringing

Freedman (née Nancy Mars) was a professional child actress for touring stage plays, and she met her husband Benedict Freedman in 1940 in Hollywood, where he was working as a writer and she was trying to break into movies. They married in 1940 despite her poor health, which began with a bout of rheumatic fever at age three and lasted her entire life.

Writing career

She began writing novels with her husband in 1947 with ''Mrs. Mike'', the fictionalized story of their friend Katherine Mary Flannigan who married a Mountie and moved from Boston to the Canadian wilderness. It became a bestseller and inspired a 1950 film adaptation. The two Freedmans wrote nine more novels together, and Freedman wrote several more by herself. Her later works, including ''Mary, Mary Quite Contrary'' (1968) and ''Sappho: The Tenth Muse'' (1998) have been called "ardently feminist." Sappho was later made into an opera composed by Daniel Steven Crafts, the libretto by Nancy and Benedict, with the premiere sung by their daughter Deborah in 1998. Her book '' Joshua Son of None'' (1973) was a political thriller about the clandestine cloning of a young assassinated President (strongly implied to be, although never actually named as, John F. Kennedy).

Family

Freedman's son,

Michael Freedman Michael Hartley Freedman (born April 21, 1951) is an American mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the 4-dimensional gen ...

, became a noted mathematician, and her two daughters also work in academia as a musician at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

and as the director of the medical humanities program at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Irvine, California, United States. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, U ...

References

1920 births 2010 deaths 20th-century American novelists American feminist writers American women novelists American stage actresses American child actresses Writers from Evanston, Illinois Actresses from Evanston, Illinois 20th-century American women writers Novelists from Illinois 21st-century American women {{US-novelist-1920s-stub