Ruth McKenney — ten books from a Mishawaka birth

1911–1972 · BORN IN MISHAWAKA, 18 NOVEMBER 1911 · GONE AT SEVEN

The tie, exactly. Ruth Marguerite McKenney was born in Mishawaka on 18 November 1911, to John Sidney McKenney, a mechanical engineer, and Marguerite Flynn, a grade-school teacher. In 1919 the family moved to East Cleveland, Ohio; she was seven, and this section claims the birth and the seven years and nothing beyond them — People carries the life at that strength, and the books are entered here on the same proportion: the fame is Cleveland's and New York's, the shelf is the nation's, the first seven years are this city's.

The book that carries her name. My Sister Eileen (1938) collected her New Yorker stories of the two sisters — the East Cleveland childhood and then the moldy one-room basement at 14 Gay Street in Greenwich Village, burgled within a week of their six months in it. The book's afterlife is the largest any Mishawaka birth has had on the stage: Fields and Chodorov's Broadway play opened 26 December 1940 — four days after the real Eileen, by then Nathanael West's wife, died with West in a California car crash — and ran past two years; the 1942 film starred Rosalind Russell; Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein made it the musical Wonderful Town (1953, 559 performances); a second musical film followed in 1955, a television series in 1960–61, and the girlhood stories, worked into a screenplay she wrote with her husband Richard Bransten, reached the screen as Margie (1946). The sequels stand on the shelf in their order: The McKenneys Carry On (1940) and All About Eileen (1952).

The rest of the shelf. Ten books stand to her name. Industrial Valley (1939), her account of the Akron rubber strike of 1932–36 — reporting transposed into a novel of the picket years, controversial in its day — she considered her best work, and this section prints her judgment as hers. Jake Home (1943), her best-selling novel, chronicled common Americans between 1900 and 1930. The Loud Red Patrick (1947), stories of an Irish widower raising four daughters in Cleveland, drawn from her grandfather, was adapted for Broadway in 1956 and ran ninety-three performances before becoming a regional-theater favorite. Then the marriage books: Love Story (1950), the story of her marriage to Bransten; Here's England (1951), the informal guide written with him; Far, Far from Home (1954), the humorous account of the family's two years in Brussels; and Mirage (1956), a historical novel of Napoleonic France and Egypt, her last. Around the books stands the periodical shelf — the New Yorker, Harper's, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, New Masses — and the screenplays she wrote with Bransten, Margie and The Trouble with Women among them; and after Bransten's death in 1955 she stopped writing. The New York Times obituary of 27 July 1972 closed the record: "Ruth McKenney Is Dead at 60; Author of 'My Sister Eileen.'"

Sources:

1. Wikipedia, "Ruth McKenney," read November 2026, against its cited record (Indiana birth certificates; the 1920 census; Marion Meade, Lonelyhearts, 2010) — the birth and family, the 1919 removal, the ten-book list with years, the adaptations' dates and runs, the death.
2. New York Times, Joan Darnton, "Ruth McKenney Is Dead at 60; Author of 'My Sister Eileen'" (27 July 1972) — the death at New York and the closing of the shelf.
3. People (this record) — the life, at birth-and-seven-years strength, with the death-date conflict (25 July standard; 15 and 27 July in other accounts) printed there whole.