Phyllis McGinley was born March 21, 1905, in Ontario, Oregon, the daughter of Daniel and Julia Kiesel McGinley. Her father was a land speculator and her mother, a pianist. McGinley’s family moved to a ranch near Iliff, Colorado, when she was only three months old. She didn’t enjoy her early childhood on the ranch where she and her brother felt isolated and friendless. At the age of 12, her father died and the family moved again, to Utah to live with a widowed aunt. She studied at the University of Southern California and musical theater at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where she was a Kappa Kappa Gamma, graduating in 1927. After selling some of her poems she decided to move to New York in 1929. McGinley held an assortment of jobs there, including copywriter for an advertising agency, teacher in a junior high school in New Rochelle, and staff writer for Town and Country.

In 1934, she met Charles L. Hayden who worked for the Bell Telephone Company during the day and played jazz piano in the evening. They married on June 25, 1937, and moved to Larchmont, New York. The suburban landscape and culture of her new home was to provide the subject matter of much of McGinley’s work. McGinley had two daughters. Daughter Julie Hayden was the author of a favorably reviewed collection of short stories entitled The Lists of the Past.

The Plain Princess by Phyllis McGinley published in 1945, it is a modern take on the conventional fairy tale. McGinley accomplishes this through the reversals of gender roles, cultural perceptions of Suburbia, and fairy tale expectations of beauty. while it contains many elements of a classic fairy tale, there are also elements of a feminist fairy tale. There is a complete non-reliance on men to resolve the complications that arise. Unlike in many other traditional fairy tales with a female protagonist, the Prince or the Father do not have any impact on the outcome of the protagonist’s fate. One character that does have a strong effect on Esmeralda’s fate is Dame Goodwit. However, her role is reversed in this story as she uses her intelligence and wisdom in order to help Esmeralda achieve her goals. In traditional fairy tales, a strong and powerful woman character like Dame Goodwit would either have been evil or have possessed magical powers. Instead, McGinley offers the reader a portrayal of a completely independent human woman.

McGinley was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. She received a number of honorary Doctor of Letters degrees (Boston College, Dartmouth College, Marquette University, St. John’s University, Smith College, Wheaton College, Wilson College) as well as the Catholic Book Club’s Campion Award (1967), the Catholic Institute of the Press Award (1960), and the Laetare Medal, conferred by the University of Notre Dame in 1964. She won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for her light verse collection, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades with Seventy New Poems (1960).

In 1956, Phyllis McGinley published a rhymed children’s story called “The Year Without a Santa Claus” in Good Housekeeping magazine, and the piece generated enough positive interest to facilitate it being printed in book form the following year. In 1968 actor Boris Karloff recorded a narrated version of the story for a promotional Capitol Records LP which also featured various Christmas songs from the label’s catalog on the flip side. Karloff’s reading is warm, vibrant and perfectly nuanced, and very similar to the feel he brought to his classic narration of the How the Grinch Stole Christmas television classic. It was also one of Karloff’s last performances—he died a few months later in February 1969.

Phyllis McGinley was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her book Times Three. She was the first to be awarded the poetry prize for a collection of light verse.

In 1964 she was honored with the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre Dame, which describes it as “An honor to a man or woman who has ‘enriched the heritage of humanity.'”