Sigrid de Lima

Sigrid de Lima (4 December 1921 – 19 September 1999) was an American novelist.

Biography She was born in New York City on 4 December 1921. She was the only child of Agnes de Lima, a writer on education, and Andrew Lang. She grew up in New York City, Mexico, and Palo Alto, California. She received her B.A. from Barnard College in 1942 and her M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in 1944.

Her first novel, The Captain's Beach, was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1950, and told the story of the residents of a rooming house near New York City's waterfront. Although Nelson Algren called it, "a very real achievement in tenderness, in understanding, and in earnestness," the New Yorker's reviewer considered the writing "painfully studied and even windy." Doris Grumbach, reviewing the book for Commonweal, wrote that it "is strong enough to use what it must and impress the whole with an originality and force of its own." In his Independent obituary, Christopher Hawtree called in a "small masterpiece": "the 150 pages take in all manner of manipulation, evil, passion and illicit congress: it could surely have been the basis for one of the era's great movies...."

Her fifth novel, Oriane (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968) received few reviews and those were less than enthusiastic. The reception so disappointed de Lima that she gave up writing completely. "It broke her heart," said Greene.

She died of a stroke in Nyack, New York, on 19 September 1999. Her daughter, Alison de Lima Greene, is a curator at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and has published a number of works on modern art.