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.
In her senior year, she won a citywide short story contest, which helped secure her admission to Washington Square College of New York University.
She spent a year in Saratoga Springs, New York, helping to set up the external degree program at Empire State College.
Around 2009, the couple moved to a Quaker retirement community in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where Pike died in March 2021, aged 91.
During her time at the college, Grumbach also began to focus on her writing career and published her first two novels, The Spoil of the Flowers (1962), and The Short Throat, The Tender Mouth (1964).
Grumbach was also a book reviewer and commentator for the Morning Edition of National Public Radio and the televised MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour.
A number of her works, such as The Spoil of the Flowers, Chamber Music, and The Ladies, focus on gay and lesbian themes and characters.
Such writers as Ann Bannon, Marijane Meaker, May Sarton, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Patricia Highsmith explored gay and lesbian themes in positive ways similar to Grumbach.
As Ann Cothran, a literary critic of writers on lesbian themes and author of a study on Simone de Beauvoir states, perhaps Grumbach's “most important contribution to gay and lesbian literature is the manner in which she consistently represents homosexual relationships matter of factly, as an integral part of the human landscape.
In Chamber Music, for example, she based the characters and the plot on the American composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian, upon Marilyn Monroe in The Missing Person, upon Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby in The Ladies, and Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus in The Magician's Girl.
[15] 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 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.