Faith McNulty (November 28, 1918 – April 10, 2005) was an American non-fiction author, probably best known for her 1980 literary journalism genre book The Burning Bed.
[1] In 1980, a collection of her New Yorker work was published as The Wildlife Stories of Faith McNulty.
She also frequently wrote children's books on wildlife, including How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World in 1979 and When I Lived With Bats in 1998.
Her husband, John McNulty, was also a writer[1] for The New Yorker and with Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese and James Baldwin, a major figure in the development of the literary genre of Creative nonfiction, which is also known as literary journalism or literature in fact.
As earlier here noted, having herself been years exposed to Harold Ross' New Yorker magazine's rarefied environment, which was then so promoting of this evolving genre, Faith's own major nonfiction work, The Burning Bed, is, itself, a quintessential and quality example of the genre of literary journalism or, as Thomas Wolfe once labeled it, the “New Journalism”.
The Burning Bed was based on the true story of Francine Hughes, who set fire to the bedroom in which her husband was sleeping.