I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Book Notes Summary

Joanne Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1932. She graduated from American University in Colorado and then went to the University of London, England. Greenberg writes as a hobby, and she was a sixth-grade teacher's aide by profession.

Greenberg is the author of the novels The Monday Voices, The King's Persons, In This Sign, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, as well as a collection of stories titled Summering. Most of her work has been published under the pseudonym Hannah Green.

J. Mitchell Morse said that "Joanne Greenberg is a charming writer, who writes about our current social problems without being doctrinaire or propagandistic or stuffy. Not many writers can do that. It is so difficult, in fact, that most of our best writers don't try. They leave life to the hacks."

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, her account of a teenage girl's struggle against mental illness, is her best-known novel, and several of her other works also deal with the troubles that beset the handicapped. The protagonist of The Monday Voices is a man who works for the Department of Rehabilitation and assists the physically handicapped in finding work. In This Sign centers on a deaf couple and the problems that they encounter over the span of almost fifty years.

Greenberg received the Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award as well as the Jewish Book Council of America award in 1963.

Bibliography

"Greenberg, Joanne." Contemporary Authors. Vol. 5-8. Barbara Harte and Carolyn Riley, Editors. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1969.

"Greenberg, Joanne." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Phyllis Carmel Mendelson and Dedria Bryfonski, Editors. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1977.

Greenberg, Joanne. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. New York: Penguin Books, 1964.

Morse, J. Mitchell. Rev. of Summering, by Joanne Greenberg. The Hudson Review Winter 1966-67: Vol. XIX, No. 4. pp. 134 in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Phyllis Carmel Mendelson and Dedria Bryfonski, Editors. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1977.

Rev. of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg. The New Republic February 13, 1971. pp. 135 in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Phyllis Carmel Mendelson and Dedria Bryfonski, Editors. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1977.