McNally was born November 3, 1938, in St. Petersburg, Florida, to Hubert Arthur and Dorothy Katharine (Rapp) McNally,[14] two transplanted New Yorkers from Irish Catholic backgrounds.[15][16] His parents ran a seaside bar and grill called The Pelican Club, but after a hurricane destroyed the establishment, the family briefly relocated to Port Chester, New York, then to Dallas, Texas, and finally to Corpus Christi, Texas. There Hubert McNally purchased and managed a Schlitz beer distributorship,[17] and McNally attended W.B. Ray High School. Despite his distance from New York City, McNally's parents enjoyed Broadway musicals. When McNally was eight years old, his parents took him to see Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman, and on a subsequent outing, McNally saw Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I.[18] McNally later said: "When I saw On the Town, with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin with the Staten Island Ferry and the Empire State Building, I said: 'That's where I want to live.' I've never regretted it."[19][a] In high school McNally was encouraged to write by a gifted English teacher, Maurine McElroy (1913–2005).[b]
He enrolled at Columbia College in 1956. There he especially enjoyed Andrew Chiappe's two-semester course on Shakespeare in which students read Shakespeare's plays in roughly the order of their composition.[22] He joined the Boar's Head Society[23] and wrote Columbia's annual Varsity Show, which featured music by fellow student Edward L. Kleban and directed by Michael P. Kahn. He graduated in 1960 with a B.A. in English and membership in Phi Beta Kappa Society.[12][24] In 1961, McNally was hired by novelist John Steinbeck to tutor his two teenage sons as the Steinbeck family took a cruise around the world.[c] On the cruise McNally completed a draft of what became the opening act of And Things That Go Bump in the Night. Steinbeck asked McNally to write the libretto for Here's Where I Belong, a musical version of the novel East of Eden.[25]
