Susan Fromberg Schaeffer was an American novelist and poet who was a Professor of English at Brooklyn College for over thirty years. She won numerous national writing awards and contributed book reviews for the New York Times.
Education and family
The daughter of wholesale clothier Irving and Edith Fromberg, Susan Fromberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Long Island's South Side High School in 1957. In the Fall, she enrolled at the University of Chicago, where she earned her Bachelors in 1961, Masters in 1963, and her Doctorate in 1966. The subject of her dissertation was a study of themes in the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, in whom she found “the most intellectual novelist to write in English since James Joyce”. After returning to New York City, she married a fellow English Professor, Neil Jerome Schaeffer in 1970; they had two children, Benjamin, and May.
Publications
As of 2007, her published work included 14 novels, a collection of short stories plus others, 6 volumes of poetry and two children's books. She contributed frequently to the New York Times Book Review and had a number of scholarly articles on writing published in journals. Her most recent project, "Memories Like Splintered Glass" is her first memoir. Her second novel Anya was based mainly on the biography of Anya Savikin Brodman, to whom Schaeffer gave only passing credit until an accommodation was reached after acrimonious public encounters between the author and her subject.
Novels
Falling, New York, Macmillan, 1973.
Anya, New York, Macmillan, 1974.
Time in Its Flight, New York, Doubleday, 1978.
Love, New York, Dutton, 1981.
First Nights, New York, Knopf, 1983.
The Madness of a Seduced Woman, New York, Dutton, 1984.
The Bible of the Beasts of the Little Field: Poems, New York, Dutton, 1980.
Children's books
The Dragons of North Chittendon, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1986.
The Four Hoods and Great Dog, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1988.
Career and personal life
After earning her master's degree and while working on her Ph.D., Fromberg instructed English at Wright Junior College in Chicago. She then began teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology and became an assistant professor of English after receiving her doctorate. She moved back to New York City in 1967 as an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, becoming an associate professor in 1972, then professor of English in 1974. In 1985, she was named Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College. She retired from Brooklyn College in 1997. After retirement, she and her husband Neil, lived at their second home in Vermont full-time until 2002. In 2002, they returned to Chicago, living there temporarily until they sold their Brooklyn property and moved to Chicago permanently in 2004. Schaeffer was a visiting Professor at her alma mater, the University of Chicago from 2002–2009, teaching fiction and creative writing before illness forced her to stop teaching in March, 2009. After a long illness, she died on August 26, 2011, and is survived by Neil, Benjamin and May. Neil died in November, 2014.
