Maureen Daly was an American author best known for her novel Seventeenth Summer (1942), one of the first to target a teenage audience.She was born in County Tyrone, Ulster, Ireland in 1921 and grew up in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Daly won an O. Henry Award for her short story, Sixteen, while still at high school. Seventeenth Summer was written before she turned twenty. By 1982, it had gone into 45 hardback editions.