Mary Quaintance ’84

Mary Quaintance died by suicide Dec. 8, 1995, in New York, N.Y.

Mary graduated with honors in comparative literature, receiving the Francis LeMoyne Page Creative Writing Award, the Ward Mathis Prize, and the Bain Swiggett Poetry Prize for her writing at Princeton. She also acted in Theater Intime and 185 Nassau Street productions.

Mary was awarded a Mellon Fellowship, with which she continued her studies at Yale. After completing coursework there, she moved to Manhattan, where she had planned to complete her dissertation. She worked for the NY Review of Books until June 1995, when she left to concentrate on writing.

Princetonians and others remember Mary for her uncompromisingly keen but flexible intellect; her passion for literature, film and baseball; the fertility of her ideas; her uncanny knack for anagrams and predicting the winners of the Oscars; and the warmth and depth of her friendship. Wrote one, "she . . . activated parts of the souls of those she befriended in a way that makes one fear one may never know them again without the stimulus she so freely offered."

The class extends its deepest sympathy to her mother, Lucy, father Chad '61, and brothers Tom and John.

The Class of 1984