Doris M. Grumbach Quotes - Inspirational, Interesting, Thoughtful Quotes by American Feminist, Lesbians, Novelist, Memoirist, Biographer, Literary Critic and Essayist

Doris M. Grumbach was born in 1918 in New York City, USA. She was a renowned American novelist, memoirist, biographer, literary critic and essayist, publisher, editor and bookseller. She taught at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the American University in Washington, DC, and was for many years the literary editor of The New Republic. She wrote several novels focusing on gay individuals and lesbian characters. For nearly two decades, Grumbach and her partner Sybil Pike ran a bookstore called Wayward Books in Sergeantsville, Maine. Grumbach was praised as a feminist writer and was also highly respected for her advocacy for lesbians. Many of Grumbach's works, such as The Spoils of the Flowers, Chamber Music, and The Ladies, focus on gay and lesbian themes and characters. Grumbach wrote in many genres as a novelist, literary critic, essayist, biographer, memoirist, and cultural critic.

Doris M. Grumbach has been grouped with other pioneering writers in the 1950s and 1960s for exploring gay and lesbian themes, who explored these themes and issues despite the popular sentiment of the time that regarded homosexuality as deviant behavior. Writers such as Ann Bannon, Marijane Meaker, May Sarton, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Patricia Highsmith explored gay and lesbian themes in positive ways similar to Grumbach's. According to Ann Cothran, a literary critic of writers on lesbian topics and author of a study on Simone de Beauvoir, perhaps Grumbach's most important contribution to gay and lesbian literature is the way in which she consistently presents lesbian relationships factually, as an integral part of the human landscape. Grumbach depicts lesbianism as a positive, life-giving force in women's lives.

Doris M. Grumbach's novels are said to be generally literary and literate, in that she often draws on well-known authors or writings for her titles and references in her works. Doris M. Grumbach took her title for The Spoils of the Flowers from a poetic fragment by Euripides, The Short Throat has phrases from Latin, French and other languages ​​in its dialogues or interior monologues. Critics have noted that she drew inspiration from historical persons and events for her novels. In Music she based the characters and plot on American composer Edward MacDowell and his wife Marion, in The Missing Person on Marilyn Monroe, in The Ladies on Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, and in The Magician's Girl on Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus.

A significant portion of Doris M. Grumbach's reputation and current audience is based on her two memoirs that focus on aging, Coming Into the End Zone and Extra Innings. She wrote The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany. Grumbach also wrote an influential review of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. Her article on an aborted plan to write a biography of Willa Cather was published in The American Scholar in January 2001.

Doris M. Grumbach became an important writer for focusing on women’s lives and women’s struggles in the redefinition of women’s roles from the 1950s onwards. Doris M. Grumbach is admired for her writing style and characterization, which often presents overtones of Henry James and Gustave Flaubert and Jane Austen. Grumbach’s focus is on social conventions and their effect on the development of individual lives and psyche. Grumbach is one of several major 20th-century women writers, such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, and Katherine Mansfield, who represent the transition from Victorian styles and emphases to the social and psychological concerns of modernity. All of Grumbach's papers (from 1938 to 2002) are archived at the New York Public Library (Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division). Doris M. Grumbach received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle in 2000. Doris M. Grumbach died on November 4, 2022 in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, USA, at the age of 104.

Here are some thoughtful, inspiring, interesting, profound thoughts of Doris M. Grumbach

Appreciation requires constant renewal and expansion.

Aging is a bit like dieting. Every day there are fewer people to pay attention to us.

My old friend, water, my good companion, my beloved mother and father, I am its most natural child.

It was dangerous to look for myself when I was completely alone. What if I found an emptiness not so great as a space filled with unpleasant content, a mixture of truths long hidden, locked up, buried, forgotten. When I went to search I was playing a desperate game of hide and seek, afraid of what I might find, most afraid of finding nothing at all.

The reason why long periods of solitude seemed so hard to endure was not because we missed others but because we began to wonder if we ourselves existed, because for so long our existence had depended on their assurances.

Raising a hand is more valuable than your fist grasping the higher rung of the ladder.

What others consider a retreat from them or a rejection of them is not such things at all but is the breeding ground for a culture of greater friendliness, of deeper engagement with them. These short stories establish Sontag's originality... her unique vision her success with experiments in form... Sontag creates a wonderful blend of life captured in the past, memory and imagination, serves it lavishly with silence and offers us a gourmet series of short courses.

My eyes light up watching a writer solve small problems.

Writers are utter egoists. For them, few things in their lives have meaning or significance unless they promise to serve some creative purpose.

One keeps friends better when one is alone. The result is that when a person meets his friends too often or when they meet for too long, he gradually loses them.

We are determined by public opinion about ourselves. Will we think we exist without external confirmation? And how long will we be isolated from others before we doubt our existence?

Having a book is somewhat like giving birth to a child, as many women writers before me have seen, conception, long preparations, waiting, increasing heaviness towards the end (in this case not of the body but of the soul and manuscript), initial happiness at seeing the product, seemingly ready and perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression.

What will the people whose opinion I care about and whose opinions I do not value but which have importance in the world of readers think of it?

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