Susan Sheehan facts for kids
Susan Sheehan (née Sachsel; born August 24, 1937) is an Austrian-born American writer.
Biography
Born in Vienna, Austria, she won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1983 for her book Is There No Place on Earth for Me? The book details the experiences of a young New York City woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. Portions of the book were published in The New Yorker, for which she has written frequently since 1961 as a staff writer. Her work as a contributing writer has also appeared in The New York Times and Architectural Digest.
In 1986, Sheehan published in The New Yorker "A Missing Plane," a three-part series about the U.S. Army's attempt to identify the remains of the victims of a 1944 airplane crash. In About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, Ben Yagoda called the article "exhaustive and ultimately exhausting."
Her husband was the journalist Neil Sheehan, whom she urged to copy what became known as the Pentagon Papers for the Times with her help, and who also won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam in 1989. Sheehan and her husband lived in Washington, D.C.
Works
Her other works include:
- 1967 Ten Vietnamese
- 1976 A welfare mother
- 1978 A prison and a prisoner
- 1984 Kate Quinton's days
- 1986 A missing plane
- 1993 Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair
- 2002 The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer: Hobbies, Collecting, and Other Passionate Pursuits (co-written with Howard Means)
