Faith McNulty, who died Sunday at her rural Rhode Island farmhouse, was a writer known for natural history books about endangered species, children’s books, and “The Burning Bed,” a 1980 best seller about an abused wife who killed her husband by setting fire to him.

The book was turned into a 1984 made-for-TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett.

McNulty was also author of “The Whooping Crane,” “Why Must They Die? The strange case of the prairie dog and the black-footed ferret,” and “Whales: Their Life in the Sea,” which author Peter Benchley praised for “conveying the marvel of the areas still unknown about whales’ intelligence” without anthropomorphizing them.

Her best-known children’s book was “How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World,” directions for doing exactly that. The book begins, “Take a shovel, find a soft place, and dig.”

McNulty grew up in New York, the daughter of Joseph Corrigan, magistrate of the Jefferson Market court and later chief city magistrate and judge of the Court of General Sessions. The family spent summers at Emdalar, a 22-room summer cottage at Kingston, R.I., built in 1883 by Stanford White.

“I can remember my father in his nightshirt, digging for worms for the baby robin in the bathroom,” McNulty told the Providence Journal in 2001. “That’s the kind of household it was; I had woodchucks in the bathroom, cats, squirrels, chipmunks …” Her mother, Faith Robinson Corrigan, founded the Animal Rescue League of Southern Rhode Island.

After attending Rhode Island State College, McNulty got a job as a copy girl for the Daily News, supposedly one of the paper’s first three female newsroom hires. She later worked for Life magazine, as well as the Office of War Information in London during World War II.

In 1943, she published a story called “No Flowers” in the New Yorker. Although it purported to be the record of a conversation between McNulty’s mother and her head gardener at Emdalar – who refused to believe that he would be required to grow vegetables instead of flowers in the estate greenhouses for the duration of the war – the story was printed as fiction.

Ten years later, McNulty became a New Yorker staff writer, publishing many Talk of the Town pieces, profiles, and articles running under the “Far Flung Correspondents” rubric.

Her husband, John McNulty, was also a writer at the magazine, and the couple kept company with the magazine’s luminaries. For many years she compiled an annual survey of children’s books for the magazine, an assignment that ended when Tina Brown took over as editor.

In the early 1950s, McNulty and her husband bought a farmhouse in Wakefield, R.I., where she found her interest in nature renewed. Many of her pieces for the New Yorker and elsewhere were reprinted in the 1980 collection “The Wildlife Stories of Faith McNulty.”

After her husband died in 1956, McNulty remarried, to Richard Martin, a set designer whose specialties included a retractable sword for onstage stabbing and a piano that broke into several pieces when struck with a large hammer. They settled at the farmhouse, where McNulty became known for taking in any stray animal brought to her by neighbors.

After many years of publishing children’s books and books on animals, McNulty was offered the project of writing about Francine Hughes, a Michigan woman who murdered her husband while he slept by dousing him with gasoline and lighting a match. The project, which included lurid descriptions of the woman’s torture at the hands of her sadistic husband, was upsetting enough to McNulty that she was prescribed tranquilizers. In the end, Hughes was acquitted on account of insanity.

In recent years, McNulty wrote a weekly column for the Providence Journal on an animal shelter operated by the Animal Welfare League; for its type, it was extremely literary.

Faith McNulty

Born Faith Trumbull Corrigan in on November 28, 1918, in New York City; died April 10 after a long illness at her home in South Kingston, R.I.; she is survived by a sister, Betsy Keiffer.