Joan Schenkar
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Joan Schenkar (15 August 1942 - 5 May 2021) was an American playwright and writer. She is known for her biographies of writer Patricia Highsmith, and Dorothy Wilde, as well as for the production of several of her plays in New York in the 1980s, including Signs of Life, Cabin Fever, and The Last of Hitler.
Joan Marlene Schenkar was born on 15 August 1942 in Seattle. Her parents, Maurice and Marlene Schenkar, were involved in real estate. She studied literature at Bennington College in Vermont, working with Stanley Edgar Hyman, the literary critic and writer for The New Yorker at the time. She developed a close friendship with Hyman's wife, the writer Shirley Jackson.[1] Schenkar completed her graduate education at University of California at Berkeley and State University of New York at Stony Brook.[2]
Schenkar went on to purchase a farm in Vermont, and divided her time between Vermont, Paris, and New York.[1] In New York, she lived for a while at the Chelsea Hotel and later on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. She owned an apartment in Paris; Umberto Eco was one of her neighbors. She died there on 5 May 2021, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.[3][4] Schenkar was Jewish, and identified as a lesbian.[4]
