Maureen Johnson

Maureen Johnson (born February 16, 1973, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American author of young adult fiction. She has published ten young adult novels to date, including the Shades of London series and the Suite Scarlett series.

Early life

Maureen Johnson is a graduate of the University of Delaware. Prior to that she attended an all-girl Catholic preparatory high school. In the short period between her undergraduate and graduate careers, Johnson worked in Philadelphia, London, and New York City. She was the literary manager of a Philadelphia theater company, a waitress in a theme restaurant, a secretary, a bartender in Piccadilly, and an occasional performer. She studied both writing and theatrical dramaturgy at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in Writing.

Career

Maureen Johnson's first novel, The Key to the Golden Firebird, was published in 2004. It was followed by The Bermudez Triangle and 13 Little Blue Envelopes in 2005, Devilish in 2006, and Girl at Sea in 2007.

Maureen Johnson (Heinlein character)

Maureen Johnson Smith Long (July 4, 1882 - June 20, 1982), most often referred to as Maureen Johnson, is a fictional character in several science fiction novels written by Robert A. Heinlein. She is the mother, lover and eventual wife of Lazarus Long, the longest-living member of Heinlein's fictional Howard Families. She is the only character from the "Lazarus Long cycle" to have an entire fictional memoir devoted to her life.

Background

Maureen first appears as a secondary character in the 1973 novel Time Enough for Love. She appears briefly in The Number of the Beast (1980), The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985) and recounts her own life story, and sometimes contradictory versions of events recorded in other Heinlein stories, in 1987's To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Early life and marriage

Maureen was born in Missouri on July 4, 1882, the daughter of Doctor Ira Johnson, a member of the Howard Families. As a young teenager, Maureen discovers this fact from her very frank father who encourages her to seek a husband from among the accepted list of family candidates. She marries Brian Smith and they settle in Kansas City and have several children, all subsidized by the Howard Families foundation.

Rent (musical)

Rent is a rock musical with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson loosely based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists struggling to survive and create a life in New York City's East Village in the thriving days of Bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.

The musical was first seen in a workshop production at New York Theatre Workshop in 1993. This same Off-Broadway theatre was also the musical's initial home following its official 1996 opening. The show's creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly of an aortic dissection, believed to have been caused by undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, the night before the Off-Broadway premiere. The show won a Pulitzer Prize, and the production was a hit. The musical moved to Broadway's larger Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996.

On Broadway, Rent gained critical acclaim and won a Tony Award for Best Musical among other awards. The Broadway production closed on September 7, 2008 after a 12-year run of 5,123 performances, the eleventh longest-running Broadway show. The production grossed over $280 million.