Arona McHugh (1925-1996) was the author of four novels, two of them set in her native Boston.
McHugh's first novel, written at the family's summer home in Sag Harbor, was A Banner With a Strange Device (1964). It prompted the critic Haskel Frankel to welcome her in The New York Times Book Review with an accolade, "The lady is a born storyteller." It became a best seller and a Literary Guild selection. The story was about a group of former G.I.'s and their wives trying to patch their lives together again in the late 1940's in Boston. A sequel, The Seacoast of Bohemia (1965), followed some of the same characters.
Next, in 1969, she wrote a historical novel, The Luck of the Van Meers, which traced several generations of a Dutch-Jewish family. Her final novel, also historical, was The Calling of the Mercenaries in 1977, about occupied Germany after WWII.
McHugh was one of the first graduates of the writer's program at the University of Iowa. She earned a M.A. in library science at Columbia University the next year.
In WWII she served in the Women's Army Corps. Before becoming a published novelist, she worked as a children's librarian at the New York Public Library. Her husband, Warren J. McHugh, was a folk artist who kept an art gallery in Sag Harbor for many years.
