At the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Lowry returned to the United States to attend a small, private high school in New York City. She had just turned 17 years old when she graduated from high school in a class of close to fifty students. The caption under her senior picture in the school yearbook reads, "Future Novelist." The following fall, Lowry entered Pembroke College, a branch of Brown University, in Rhode Island, to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a writer. However, she dropped out at the end of her sophomore year to get married at the age of 19. Because her husband, Donald Lowry, was a Naval officer, Lowry resumed a military lifestyle that included traveling and living wherever her husband was stationed. When her husband left the service to attend Harvard Law School, they settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After her husband finished law school, the Lowry family, which now included four children, moved to Portland, Maine. Lowry eventually received a bachelor's degree in 1973, at the age of 36, from the University of Southern Maine, and then immediately began work on a master's degree.
While attending graduate school, Lowry established herself as an accomplished freelance journalist. She began writing stories and articles that appeared in publications such as Redbook, Yankee, and Down East, as well as in newspapers. She also edited two textbooks — Black American Literature (1973) and Literature of the American Revolution (1974), both written by J. Weston Walsh — and became a photographer, specializing in photographs of children. In 1978, a collection of her photographs of buildings and houses was published in a book titled Here in Kennebunkport.
Lowry's first novel, A Summer to Die (1977), is about the relationship between two adolescent sisters, Meg and Molly, and the effect that Molly's death, as a result of leukemia, has on the family. Lowry based the relationship between Meg and Molly on her own memories of her relationship with her older sister, Helen, as they were growing up, and on the feelings and emotions that she felt when Helen died at the age of twenty-eight of cancer. Lowry experienced other heartaches as well. Lowry's oldest son, Grey, a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force, was killed in a plane crash in 1995. In addition, Lowry has a daughter who became disabled as a result of a disease involving the central nervous system. Her daughter's disability has reinforced Lowry's belief that people are "connected" despite their physical differences.
