Mary Doyle Curran

Her work, described by poet Anne Halley as being "haunted" by issues of gender, ethnicity, and class, included many poems and a novel dealing with Irish-American life.

[2] While at Queens, her students included poet Lloyd Schwartz, who reported after her death that she included contemporary poets such as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, and Richard Wilbur in her survey of American literature even though "she wasn't supposed to.

"[4] Another student at Queens was civil rights activist Andrew Goodman; after Goodman was murdered, Curran found among her papers a poem he had written for her class, "A Corollary to a Poem by A. E. Housman," and had it published in The Massachusetts Review; it was also published in The New York Times.

In a review in the New York Times, Mary McGrory describes it as "a bold book" and "an album-like novel made up of unflattering, unretouched pictures of three generations of an Irish-American family.

"[7] Subsequently the novel has been understood in a feminist context; as one critic puts it, the protagonist's "personal strength and her narrative voice reflect the honesty of a cooperative matrilineal heritage, a legacy which is continually contrasted to the competitive patrimony of hypocrisy and affectation divided among the male members of her family.