Novelist and poet Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is a prolific contemporary American author whose fiction is often dominated by women and the female point of view and filled with daydreams about escaping constant suffering. Schaeffer explores familial breakups and alienation, isolation, depression, the struggle for individual identity, and the power of memory. Her novels and poetry cross several genres and historical periods, and she has been praised for her ability to place the reader within her literary landscapes. Although she was not connected to the Holocaust through personal or family experience, Schaeffer's novel Anya (1974) has remained a major contribution to Holocaust literature. Critics have stressed its particular achievement in imaginatively entering the heroine's universe and rendering both the particular and universal.

Susan Fromberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 25 March 1941 and raised in New York, where she attended PS 206 Brooklyn Southside High School. She is a third-generation American...