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:

Website

Penguin Classics will be reissuing Joanne Greenberg’s

In This Sign

with a new introduction by Sara Novic

in September 2024

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.

(Penguin Classics, May 2022)

In This Sign

The bestselling modern classic about a deaf couple, their hearing child, and the bond they create through sign language, featuring a new introduction by Sara Nović, author of the New York Times bestseller True Biz, and a new afterword by the author.

Abel and Janice meet at a school for the deaf. Sign language brings them together, enabling them to survive and, indeed, to forge a love too powerful to be broken by the world into which they were born. Spanning forty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, In This Sign follows the lives of Abel, Janice, and their hearing daughter, Margaret, as they contend uneasily with the “Outside”—a world designed, often purposely, to be inhospitable to those like them.

First published in 1970, only a decade after ASL’s formal recognition as a language and well before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, In This Sign stands out as a rare, compassionate portrait of the deaf community.

(Penguin Classics, September 2024)