Joanne Greenberg

Joanne Greenberg is an internationally renowned, award-winning author of sixteen novels and four collections of short stories. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she graduated from American University, where she majored in anthropology and English, and also studied at the University of London and the University of Colorado. Her second novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, published in 1964, has sold millions of copies and was adapted into a 1977 movie and a 2004 play of the same name. Greenberg lives with her husband, Albert, near Lookout Mountain, Colorado, where she writes daily, tutors Latin and Hebrew, is active in Congregation Beth Evergreen, has been an adjunct professor of cultural anthropology and fiction writing at the Colorado School of Mines, and has volunteered as an EMT.

For more information about Joanne Greenberg:

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Penguin Classics reprints Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden with a new foreword by Esmé Weijun Wang

“The life and wit in this book jumps right off the page” - Vanity Fair

“A fearless coming-of-age novel” - The Atlantic

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman’s struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword by Esmé Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author

After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her “normal” life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge.

A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar–a very different portrait of psychological breakdown–I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century later, a timeless and ultimately hopeful book, ripe for rediscovery by a new generation eager to erase the stigma of mental illness.

“Convincing and emotionally gripping.” ―The New York Times

“A rare and wonderful insight into the dark kingdom of the mind.” ―Chicago Tribune

“A mov­ing nov­el of per­se­ver­ance against life’s strug­gles . . . [It] facil­i­tates mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sion about the con­nec­tions between anti­semitism, gen­er­a­tional trau­ma, and men­tal health.”―Jewish Book Council

(Penguin Classics, May 2022)

In This Sign

From the award-winning author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg presents a poignant novel of family whose love and courage enable them to survive in the silent world of the deaf.

Abel and Janice Ryder began their married life together with all the hopes and dreams of a young couple deeply in love. But before long they realize that their deafness stands as an immense barrier between them and a society that seems to work only for those who can hear.

Inexperienced, ignorant, and bewildered, Abel and Janice leave the harsh environment of a school for the disabled and enter the insensitive world of the hearing. Through years of debt and misunderstanding, hard and degrading work, the raising of a hearing daughter, common tragedies and joys, they learn that the remarkable tool of sign language enables them to survive and, indeed, to forge a love too powerful to be broken by the painful, extraordinary world into which they were born.

Spanning four generations, In This Sign is the story of one family’s struggle to carve a place for itself out of the tides of wealth, war, and human strivings in America.

(Holt, September 1984)