Author Susan Fromberg Schaeffer dead at 71

From the Chicago Tribune (Aug 28): Author Susan Fromberg Schaeffer dead at 71
She wrote with beauty about some of the ugliest things in the world: war, the Holocaust, suicide, heartbreak and despair.

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, author of 14 novels including "Buffalo Afternoon" (1989), the definitive novel about the Vietnam War and its long and complex echo throughout American life, died Friday. She lived with her husband, Neil Schaeffer, in Hyde Park and had been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

She suffered a stroke 2 1/2 years ago, her husband said, forcing her retirement from the university, and had never recovered her speech or mobility. A second stroke last week was the cause of death, he said. She was 71.

"All of her work is elegiac. It is about loss, about how life is difficult and eventually, everything is taken from you," Neil Schaeffer said. "No two books were the same, but they all had the same depth of feeling in them."

The author once said she had been a "radical pessimist" -- until she spent several years talking to Vietnam veterans as part of her research for writing "Buffalo Afternoon." That experience, she said, turned her into "a somewhat hesitant, if not wobbly, optimist."

Fromberg Schaeffer was born in Brooklyn but always claimed that her life truly began at the University of Chicago. She earned an undergraduate degree there in 1961, a master's degree in 1963 and doctoral degree in 1966. Her first teaching jobs, undertaken while she was still in graduate school, were at Chicago's Wright Junior College -- now Wilbur Wright College -- and theIllinois Institute of Technology.

In 1967 she moved back to her hometown to teach at Brooklyn College, where she met her husband, an English Department colleague. Neil Schaeffer is the author of “The Marquis de Sade: A Life” (1999). The couple have two adult children.

At Brooklyn College, Fromberg Schaeffer was a mentor to an African-American poet named Sapphire, encouraging her to begin her first novel. That novel became the acclaimed “Push” (1996).

In 2002, Fromberg Schaeffer returned to Chicago, where she served as a visiting professor in the English and creative writing departments at the University of Chicago.

Along with her novels, which include “The Madness of a Seduced Woman” (1984) and “Poison” (2006), she published six volumes of poetry, two children's books and many book reviews and critical essays.

She never minded pushing boundaries in her work, her husband said, a trait that first manifested itself in grad school at the U. of C.

“She wrote the very first dissertation on (Vladimir) Nabokov. She had to fight to do it, because he was still alive.”

Among more traditional scholars, a living author's reputation has not yet passed the test of time to be deemed great.

Fromberg Schaeffer faced similar resistance when she undertook a novel about the Vietnam War that would become “Buffalo Afternoon.” Some said that a writer who had not seen combat — and who was female, to boot — had no business trying to depict war.

As Fromberg Schaeffer wrote in an essay describing the novel's gestation, “Everyone believed it could not be done by a woman — as if men would somehow be alien beings to a member of the opposite sex.”

She proved them wrong with a superb novel that follows Pete Bravado, a young man from an Italian immigrant family who serves in Vietnam and then must come to terms with what he saw and felt. The book is lyrical but also searingly, viscerally authentic. In his 1989 review, Nicholas Proffitt wrote in The New York Times, “She got it and she got it right, and somehow managed to squeeze the entire Vietnam experience into one epic narrative.”

Fromberg Schaeffer spent years researching the novel, talking to veterans for hundreds of hours.

“She was an excellent listener,” Neil Schaeffer said, “so they told her what was true.”

Her research for other novels was equally scrupulous and painstaking. She would immerse herself in other lives, other historical periods — “Anya” (1974) was about a Holocaust victim from Poland, and “The Snow Fox” (2004) explored the lives of lovers in medieval Japan — and then, once the information and emotion had been digested, would write in a long frantic dash, her husband recalled.

“I loved watching her process of creativity,” he said. “She would spend years on a book, distilling it, and when she sat down to write, she said it was like watching a movie. It was all there. It came out fully formed.”

After relocating to Chicago, he said, they sold their Brooklyn home but kept a Vermont farmhouse as a getaway. “She wrote many books there,” he said.

But Chicago was the city that fired her imagination, first and last.

Her first published novel, “Falling” (1973), was about a suicidal woman at a fictional Chicago college.

The author was not sentimental about her profession, once writing in an essay, “Probably writers should forget what it was like to write the last novel, and the one before that, and the one before that, or we should all be plumbers. It must be good to be a plumber. Everyone is happy to see you, and no one reviews your work.”

The opening of “Buffalo Afternoon” could serve as a summary of Fromberg Schaeffer's career, one devoted to capturing the truth about emotional experiences, one that never flinched from an engagement with some of the darker moments in human history: “There is so much I would like to tell you …”

Tell us she did, and in prose that was passionate and unforgettable.