Her marriage at 32 to Clifton Daniel in 1956 and the birth of their four sons sharply curtailed her acting career. But she continued to appear in summer stock productions and in 1965 was host of the CBS television program "International Hour."
She settled happily into the role of wife, mother and New York society matron -- a happiness only slightly dimmed when she moved back to Washington in the mid-1970s after her husband became Washington bureau chief for the New York Times.
But another career she had never planned or prepared for was gestating, and that was writing. Critics were kinder about the efforts of Daniel the untrained writer than they had been about her carefully tutored efforts as a singer.
Writing, she once told an interviewer, was "the hardest and most exacting career I've ever had."
She wrote her first book in self-defense. Knowing that an unauthorized biography of her life was planned, she wanted to head it off by relating her own life in her own way. "Souvenir: Margaret Truman's Own Story" was written with the help of Margaret Cousins and published in 1956.
That account of her Missouri childhood, life in the White House and concert singing career was greeted by the New York Herald Tribune book review as "a gracefully written tale of an average American girl drawn by chance into the White House."
In 1972, she published the bestselling biography of her father, "Harry S. Truman." Critics praised its homey personal insights into Truman as a family man and its candor in relating such incidents as Winston Churchill telling Truman in 1952 that he had considered him an inept successor to Roosevelt. The British statesman added, she wrote: "I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization."
She wrote "Women of Courage" in 1976 about 12 admirable women she had selected from Revolutionary to modern times and dedicated it to her mother, who died in 1982. Four years later, she wrote a rare biography of her mother, "Bess W. Truman," a woman so private she burned most of her personal correspondence, leaving little information for historians to explore.
In nonfiction, Daniel also edited two volumes of her father's letters and wrote the 1995 group biography "First Ladies."
