Doris Grumbach

Doris M. Grumbach (née Isaac; July 12, 1918 – November 4, 2022) was an American novelist, memoirist, biographer, literary critic, and essayist. She taught at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and American University in Washington, D.C., and was literary editor of The New Republic for several years. She published many novels highlighting and focusing on gay and lesbian characters. For two decades, she and her partner, Sybil Pike, operated a bookstore, Wayward Books, in Sargentville, Maine.

Personal life Doris M. Isaac was born in New York City as a fifth-generation Manhattanite, to Leonard William Isaac and Helen Oppenheimer. When she was six, her younger sister Joan Elaine Isaac was born.

She grew up in Manhattan, where she attended elementary school PS 9. A very bright student, she skipped many grades and entered high school at age eleven. She was not prepared socially for this early advancement and did poorly, developing a stammer and losing her self-confidence. She was encouraged by the principal to take a year off from high school. When she returned, she was an indifferent student in the classroom, but showed talent in theater and in creative writing. In her senior year, she won a citywide short story contest, which helped secure her admission to Washington Square College of New York University.

In 1940, she earned her Master of Arts degree in medieval literature from Cornell University. There, she met her husband, Leonard Grumbach, who was studying for his doctorate in neurophysiology. They were married on October 5, 1941.

After the war, Grumbach moved around the country with her husband as he taught physiology. During this period, the Grumbachs had four daughters: Barbara, Jane, Elizabeth, and Kathryn. Before the birth of their fourth daughter, the Grumbachs settled in Albany, New York, where Leonard Grumbach taught at Albany Medical College and Doris Grumbach began a career in teaching.

In 1971, after raising their children, Grumbach left her husband. She spent a year in Saratoga Springs, New York, helping to set up the external degree program at Empire State College. Following her divorce, she began a relationship with Sybil Pike, who became and remained her life partner. In 1972, accepting a position at The New Republic magazine as literary editor, Grumbach and Pike moved to Washington, D.C. Pike worked for the Library of Congress.

In 1990 Grumbach and Pike moved themselves and the bookstore to Sargentville, Maine. In 2009 Wayward Books and their house in Maine were sold.

Around 2009, the couple moved to a Quaker retirement community in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where Pike died in March 2021, aged 91. Grumbach continued to write, contributing pieces of memoir and articles on old age to The American Scholar. Grumbach celebrated her 100th birthday in 2018,

Career During 1940–1941, Grumbach worked for Loew's Inc./MGM writing subtitles for films distributed abroad. During 1941–1942, she was employed as a proofreader for Mademoiselle magazine and then for the journal Architectural Forum in 1942–1943, eventually rising to the position of associate editor. When her husband was drafted during World War II, Grumbach joined the U.S. Navy in 1943 as an officer in the WAVES and served from 1943 to 1945.

A significant part of her reputation and the current audience is based upon her two memoirs that focus on aging: Coming into the End Zone and Extra Innings. She also explored spiritual reflections about her life in The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany and in her memoir Fifty Days of Solitude. Grumbach penned introductions and critical assessments of the works of such writers as Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston. Grumbach also wrote an influential review of the novel Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. Her article on an aborted plan to write a biography of Willa Cather was published in The American Scholar in January 2001.

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. This dimension is especially true with regard to her positive presentations of lesbians and lesbian lifestyles. Grumbach is admired for her writing style and characterization, which often presents overtones of Henry James and of Gustave Flaubert and Jane Austen in Grumbach's focus upon social conventions and their influence upon the development of individual lives and psyches. 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. Grumbach's papers (from 1938 to 2002) are archived in the New York Public Library (Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division).

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