Maude Hutchins

A drawing from her 1932 work, Diagrammatics, which she co-published with Mortimer J. Adler, was enlarged and displayed as a mural in the Hall of Science at the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, Illinois.

[2] She exhibited also at the New Haven Paint and Clay Club, became a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors and showed with that organization in New York.

"[11] Her second novel A Diary of Love (1950) was threatened with banning in Chicago, but the municipal authorities retreated when the American Civil Liberties Union and other leading literary figures came to the book’s defense.

[13] Hutchins is best known today for her sexual coming-of-age novel Victorine,[5] which was originally published in 1959, and then republished in 2008 by New York Review Books Classics.

It was reviewed to be "a sly, shocking, one-of-a-kind novel that explores sex and society with wayward and unabashedly weird inspiration, a drive-by snapshot of the great abject American family in its suburban haunts by a literary maverick".

[7] Terry Castle writes on her relationship to motherhood: "[Maude] doted on her Great Dane, Hamlet, but “never” took her own young children out for a walk.

Milton Mayer wrote in 1993 that Mr. Hutchins was forced to spend nearly thirty years in an ‘isolated hell’, struggling to ‘keep Maude quiet’.

Whenever “poor Bob” had to attend a presidential function, another says, Maude would throw a “window-rattling tantrum” and threaten to “blow the roof off.” She was “extravagant”, “selfish” and “constitutionally uninterested in most of mankind.”[5] It was also rumored that both of them were homosexuals to some extent, Castle writing that "[Robert Hutchins'] emotional focus was entirely on other men".

One of her most embarrassing freaks—or so the story goes—was to send Christmas cards to all the Chicago faculty and trustees featuring a drawing of the Hutchins’ 14-year-old daughter Franja, nude and in an alarmingly suggestive pose.