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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | JANUARY 2025 51 We are planning events and will keep you posted via our Rainbow Group Facebook and email. is month our selection for the Famous LGBT Americans series is Doris Grumbach, a novelist, literary critic, biographer, memoirist, reviewer, and essayist who sympathetically portrayed lesbian characters in her ction and memoirs. Grumbach (née Isaac) was born in New York City in 1918. She began high school at 11 years of age. She received an undergraduate degree in philosophy from New York University in 1939 and a master's in medieval literature from Cornell University in 1940. At Cornell, she met Leonard Grumbach, and the two married in 1941 and had four children. In the 1950s, Grumbach taught English at various schools. From 1960 to 1971, she was a professor of English at the College of St. Rose in Albany. In 1972, she and her husband divorced, and she began her relationship with Sybil Pike. Grumbach published seven novels and six memoirs. ese included e Spoil of the Flowers (1962), e Short roat, e Tender Mouth (1964), Chamber Music (1979), e Missing Person (1981), e Ladies (1984), e Magician's Girl (1987), and e Book of Knowledge (1995). Her novels included matter-of-fact portrayals of lesbian women in the 1950s and 1960s. She also was a literary critic for NPR, New Republic, PBS, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Commonweal, and America magazine. e following is a description of the memoir, e Ladies, by its publisher, W. W. Norton & Company: "e Ladies is a touching, imaginative retelling of the story of two of history's most interesting characters: Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, well-born Irish women who deed all conventions of their 18th-century Irish homeland and eloped to the small hamlet of Llangollen in Wales, where they lived as a married couple. ere, … they hoped to live out their quiet lives. But the world outside gradually came to claim the Ladies – rst out of curiosity, but eventually on the basis of profound respect, and even love." Grumbach later also taught at American University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Iowa. Pike died at 91 in 2021 and Grumbach in 2022 at the age of 104. For more information on Doris Grumbach and on the sources for this article, please go to the Rainbow Group's Facebook page or request a copy via our email (rainbowgroup@myyahoo.com). ~ Dan Hazeltine and Frank Galvan Rainbow Group

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