Background
HEILBRUN, Carolyn was born on January 13, 1926 in East Orange, New Jersey, United States. Daughter of Archibald Heilbrun and Estelle (Roemer) Gold.
( “A frank, passionate plea for us to move away from sexu...)
“A frank, passionate plea for us to move away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen. . . . An interesting, lively and valuable general introduction to a new way of perceiving our Western cultural tradition, with emphasis upon English literature.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review In this quietly provocative book, Carolyn G. Heilbrun opens our eyes to the ways in which the concept of androgyny—the realization of man in woman and woman in man—has run, like a hidden river, from its source in pre-Hellenic myth through the literature of the Western world. The androgynous ideal shows itself to be a creative and civilizing force conducive to the survival of a truly human society.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394461754/?tag=2022091-20
( Carolyn Heilbrun's important investigation into issues ...)
Carolyn Heilbrun's important investigation into issues of identity for twentieth-century American women: the problem with past role models, ways to construct new ones. "Men have monopolized human experience, leaving women unable to imagine themselves as both ambitious and female. If I imagine myself (woman has always asked) whole, active, a self, will I not cease, in some profound way, to be a woman? The answer must be: imagine, and the old idea of womanhood be damned. . . . Let us imagine ourselves as selves, as at once striving and female. Womanhood can be what we say it is, not what they have always told us it was."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310760/?tag=2022091-20
(From one of America's most respected critics comes an acc...)
From one of America's most respected critics comes an acclaimed biography of the controversial feminist. Here, Heilbrun illuminates the life and explores the many facets of Steinem's complex life, from her difficult childhood to the awakening that changed her into the most famous feminist in the world. Intimate and insightful, here is a biography that is as provocative as the woman who inspired it. Photos.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345406214/?tag=2022091-20
( "Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified,...)
"Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal in life. All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers, and public figures. Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. They met in college, they remained aware of one another as friends or, if less than friends, companions and fellow crusaders on behalf of similar ideals. Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become. Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being." With these words, Carolyn Heilbrun begins a personal, pointed, and surprisingly moving account of how a woman, destined to become one of the leading feminist critics of her day as well as one of our most popular mystery novelists, found the models for the life she aspired to in men who neither imagined nor countenanced women as their equals or colleagues. Remembering these three figures as they were when she hung upon their printed words and professorial presences, reappraising them now half a century later, Heilbrun vividly evokes what these remarkable individuals had to offer to an admiring young woman who could not acknowledge—and later would not accept—the impossibility of following in their paths. In the admired anthologies, magazine articles, and introductions through which Fadiman transmitted the world of high culture to an educated general public, he indicated no devotion to questions of female destiny; yet long before Heilbrun could imagine the life in the academy that was denied to Fadiman but would eventually be hers, his was the career to which she privately aspired. Later, in her days as a graduate student at Columbia, it was Trilling who would have the most powerful intellectual effect upon her, formulating as he did the tensions inherent in the desire to salvage what was of worth from a sad, almost moribund culture, even if he frankly admitted to no interest in teaching women or in considering their destinies beyond the domestic sphere. Only the courtly Barzun, also a mentor at Columbia, seemed capable of respecting female accomplishment and eschewing stereotyped views of women. Yet together, all three men unconsciously made Heilbrun's life as a feminist possible, by representing both what she wished to join and what she needed to struggle against. When Men Were the Only Models We Had is a loving, admiring, but stringent account of youthful enthusiasms, of the romance of ideas, of the intellectual brilliance of three unwitting mentors, and of the hopelessness of female ambition in the years before the feminist movement of the last three decades of the last century. And it is, in the end, a book that offers splendid proof that the models we once had are no longer the only ones before us.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812236327/?tag=2022091-20
professor of English literature and author
HEILBRUN, Carolyn was born on January 13, 1926 in East Orange, New Jersey, United States. Daughter of Archibald Heilbrun and Estelle (Roemer) Gold.
Bachelor, Wellesley College, 1947. Master of Arts, Columbia University, 1951. Doctor of Philosophy, Columbia University, 1959.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Pennsylvania, 1984. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Bucknell University, 1985. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Russell Sage College, 1987.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Smith College, 1989. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Berea College, 1991. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), New School for Social Research, 1993.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Lewis and Clark College, 1993. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Pace University, 1996. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Brown University, 1997.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary)(honorary), Lewis and Clark University, 1993. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary)(honorary), Duke University, 1998. Doctor of Fine Arts (honorary), Rivier College, 1986.
Doctor of Fine Arts, University St. Thomas, 1994.
Instructor Brooklyn College, 1959-1960, Columbia University, New York City, 1960-1962, assistant professor, 1962-1967, associate professor, 1967-1972, professor English literature, 1972—1986, Avalon Foundation professor humanities, 1986-1993, professor emeritus New York City, 1986-1993. Visiting professor University California, Santa Cruz, 1979, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1981, Yale Law School, 1989.
( “A frank, passionate plea for us to move away from sexu...)
( Carolyn Heilbrun's important investigation into issues ...)
(Edition: First Edition; Fine/Very Good Dust Jacket; Insid...)
(From one of America's most respected critics comes an acc...)
( "Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified,...)
(Ballantine Books ed)
(First Edition)
Author: The Garnett Family, 1961, Christopher Isherwood, 1970, Towards Androgyny, 1973, Reinventing Womanhood, 1979, Writing a Woman's Life, 1988, Hamlet's Mother and Other Women, 1990, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem, 1995, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, 1997, When Men Were the Only Models We Had, My Teachers: Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling, 2002, Collected Stories by Amanda Cross, 1997, 12 novels as Amanda Cross, 1964-1998 (Nero Wolfe award, 1981), In the Last Analysis, 1964, The James Joyce Murder, 1967, Poetic Justice, 1970, The Theban Mysteries, 1971, The Question of Max, 1971, Death in a Tenured Position, 1981, Sweet Death, Kind Death, 1984, No Word from Winnifred, 1986, A Trap for Fools, 1989, The Players Come Again, 1990, An Imperfect Spy, 1995, The Puzzled Heart, 1998.
Member Modern Language Association (president 1984, Life Achievement award 1999), American Academy Arts and Sciences (elected), Mystery Writers American (executive board 1982-1984), Phi Beta Kappa.
Married James Heilbrun, February 20, 1945. Children: Emily, Margaret, Robert.