32 Facts About Doris Grumbach

Doris M Grumbach was an American novelist, memoirist, biographer, literary critic, and essayist.

Doris Grumbach taught at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and American University in Washington, DC, and was literary editor of The New Republic for several years.

Doris Grumbach published many novels highlighting and focusing on gay and lesbian characters.

Doris Grumbach grew up in Manhattan, where she attended elementary school PS 9.

Doris Grumbach was not prepared socially for this early advancement and did poorly, developing a stammer and losing her self-confidence.

Doris Grumbach was encouraged by the principal to take a year off from high school.

Doris Grumbach majored in philosophy and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1971, after raising their children, Doris Grumbach left her husband.

Doris Grumbach spent a year in Saratoga Springs, New York, helping to set up the external degree program at Empire State College.

Doris Grumbach published another fiction novel, The Book of Knowledge, in 1995, and several memoirs focusing mostly on aging.

Doris Grumbach continued to write, contributing pieces of memoir and articles on old age to The American Scholar.

Doris Grumbach celebrated her 100th birthday in 2018, and died in Kennett Square on November 4,2022, at the age of 104.

When her husband was drafted during World War II, Doris Grumbach joined the US Navy in 1943 as an officer in the WAVES and served from 1943 to 1945.

Doris Grumbach worked as a literary editor for The New Republic.

Doris Grumbach remained in Washington with Pike and in 1975 accepted a position as a professor of American literature at American University.

In 1979, Doris Grumbach published the novel Chamber Music, which was critically well-received and helped establish her reputation as a novelist.

Doris Grumbach was a book reviewer and commentator for the Morning Edition of National Public Radio and the televised MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour.

In 1985, Doris Grumbach resigned from her professorship at American University but remained in Washington, DC for five more years.

Several facets of Doris Grumbach's work have won her both praise and criticism.

Doris Grumbach is often lauded as a feminist writer, championing the cause of women in her fiction and revealing the economic, social, and psychological difficulties women face.

Doris Grumbach is both highly regarded and often criticized for her focus on gay and lesbian characters.

Doris Grumbach wrote in a wide range of genres, as a novelist, literary critic, essayist, biographer, memoirist, and cultural critic.

Doris Grumbach depicts lesbianism as a positive, life-giving force in women's lives.

Doris Grumbach's novels tend to be literary and literate in tone in that she often draws upon well-known writers or writings for her titles and for references within her works.

Doris Grumbach explored spiritual reflections about her life in The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany and in her memoir Fifty Days of Solitude.

Doris Grumbach penned introductions and critical assessments of the works of such writers as Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Doris Grumbach wrote an influential review of the novel Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.

Doris Grumbach remains an important author for the focus she brought to women's lives and women's struggles in the redefinition of women's roles from the 1950s onward.

Doris Grumbach is admired for her writing style and characterization, which often presents overtones of Henry James and of Gustave Flaubert and Jane Austen in Doris Grumbach's focus upon social conventions and their influence upon the development of individual lives and psyches.

Doris Grumbach is one of several 20th-century women writers, such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, and Katherine Mansfield, who represents a transition from Victorian styles and emphases combined with the social and psychological concerns of modernism.

Doris Grumbach's papers are archived in the New York Public Library.

Doris Grumbach received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 2000.