Sylvia Frumkin


Sylvia Frumkin is the pseudonym given for the schizophrenic subject of Susan Sheehan's 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Is There No Place on Earth for Me? first published serially in The New Yorker. A quotation from the book, giving some of her dialog, gives some of the general flavor of her behavior:
As a result of the publication of her history, she was given more effective treatment. Nonetheless, she continued to go in and out of mental hospitals and died in 1994, according to a follow-up article by Susan Sheehan in The New Yorker titled "The Last Days of Sylvia Frumkin." The same article disclosed her legal name as Maxine Mason, sister of U.S. Democratic Party activist Trudy Mason.