Sonya Schulberg O’Sullivan died at her home in Mamaroneck, N.Y., on June 3.

She was 98 and her daughter, Dr. Chris S. O’Sullivan, who had been taking care of her for three years in Mamaroneck, attributed her demise to old age.

The Saltonstalls introduced Ben O’Sullivan and Sonya to the Vineyard in 1949 and it took. Sonya spent most of every summer on the Island, first in Chilmark and Menemsha, where they rented, then in West Tisbury when they bought a place on Muddy Cove in 1968.

She was born Feb. 19, 1918, in New York city, to B.P. and Adeline Jaffe Schulberg, four years after her brother Budd. “We first met in 1918. I was a week old,” she wrote for his memorial. “He was an older man of four. Instantly I was impressed.”

Her father, having begun writing photoplays for Edwin Porter in New York, where he was reputed to have coined the phrase “The It Girl,” in reference to Lillian Gish, was named head of production at Paramount Pictures and the family migrated to Los Angeles. Sonya attended The Progressive School, cofounded by her mother. There she learned to follow her talents for observing nature and telling stories, but not to add or spell.

Adeline built one of the first houses in Malibu, when it was still a remote outpost of fishing shacks. Growing up in the culture that came to be called Hollywood, Sonya was a self-doubting rebel, who turned to nature, books and hard work as an alternative. In recent decades she wrote a series of stories that she was stringing into a novel she called Having a Terrible Time, Wish You Were Here.

The Malibu house was a refuge for the children, now including Sonya’s younger brother Stuart. After their parents divorced, the children were sent away to different schools while Ad established a talent agency in Los Angeles and London. Sonya was sent to finishing school in Paris, then to the Ecole Internationale in Geneva, then the London School of Economics, Edgewood in Westchester, and Sarah Lawrence College. At the start of World War II, her mother moved to New York city and created a literary agency, The Ad Schulberg agency, which thrived until her death in 1977.

Sonya’s first novel (and last published novel), They Cried a Little, was published by Scribners when she was 19. She claimed that her mentor at Sarah Lawrence, the poet Genevieve Taggard, told her to drop out of college and write. She moved to Malibu, wrote a second novel and many stories, sometimes renting a cabin at Big Bear or in Yosemite and skiing with her good friend Virginia (Jigee) Ray, Budd’s first wife.

Having followed Budd into the Communist Party, her second novel was strongly influenced by the party line. Her editor, Maxwell Perkins, took her to visit his daughter. She got the message: move East, get married, have children, live in the suburbs. It was not a good time to be a woman, especially not in the motion picture business.

She loved horses, dogs, and nature, even rocks and hurricanes.

She moved to New York, and met Ben O’Sullivan, a young lawyer whom she married on July 25, 1941. Ben was urban, a jazz aficionado; Sonya was country and tone deaf. They compromised on the suburbs, a solution that for a long time satisfied neither of them but became exactly right as they grew older. Sonya turned her backyard into a wildlife refuge, inhabited by raccoons, a skunk, an occasional opossum, black and gray squirrels, and birds. A mallard couple, Mr. and Mrs. Duck, still spends the spring trolling her pool and frequenting the bird feeders.

She had a number of magazine articles published, and assisted in the writing of Walter Teller’s biography of Joshua Slocum on the Vineyard.

Besides writing, her dancer’s training drove her to be physically active. She took long walks with a procession of animals, and was an avid gardener in Mamaroneck and West Tisbury, where her eye for landscaping became apparent. She founded a branch of the Sierra Club in Westchester and was intensely involved in advocating for wolves. Sonya did not learn to cook until the age of 40, but studied the Gourmet Cookbook, Julia Child, and became a sophisticated chef who threw a Vineyard Labor Day party with delicacies she prepared for three days.

Always ruthlessly honest, she described growing old as a progression of losses: husband, brothers, son, one friend after another, car and license, freedom and independence, physical agility, hair. She maintained physical grace and wit throughout her decline. Her quasi-niece Liz Frank described her as “this dry martini of a person, who cared about all the right things and didn’t give a damn about what doesn’t matter.

She had many deep and devoted friendships, including on the Vineyard. Chilmark summer life was tennis and swimming at Windy Gates, dips in Menemsha and Lambert’s Cove, rounds of parties. West Tisbury life was clearing the land, creating a garden with bare hands and perpetually dirty fingernails, reading on the deck, typing on her old Royal typewriter, and always walking her dog, and other dogs who cared to tag along. She took her dogs everywhere, to the chagrin of her friends. Later the restrictions on dogs — leash laws, and beaches that banned canines — were intolerable to her, and she switched to cats.

She smoked for 83 years, finally quitting at 96, when it no longer appealed to her. She outlived many, including her older brother Budd Schulberg, to whom she remained devoted. Her younger brother Stuart died relatively young and she missed him always.

In addition to her daughter Chris, Sonya is survived by John’s children, her granddaughters Sarah and Kate O’Sullivan, great- grandson Will McCullough, and daughter in law Susan O’Sullivan, all of Washington, D.C. and Muddy Cove, West Tisbury; niece Vicky Kingsland, an Idaho farmer (Budd’s child with his first wife); Steve Schulberg (Budd’s surviving son with his second wife; sister in law Betsy Schulberg of New York city and Menemsha; and Budd and Betsy’s children, Benn and Jessica Schulberg; Stuart’s children, Sandra, KC, Peter and Jon Schulberg; and two designated nieces, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer and Bard professor Elizabeth Frank (niece of Jigee), and writer and mathematician Beth O’Sullivan.

She was interred in the West Tisbury Cemetery on June 8.

Donations in her memory can be sent to the Doris Day Animal Foundation, 8033 Sunset Boulevard, Suite 845, Los Angeles, CA 90046 (online at DDAF); PETA, F.A.C.T, or Farm Sanctuary; or any organization protecting wolves, elephants or whales, or thoroughbred horse rescue.