Susan Sheehan

Susan Sheehan (née Sachsel; born August 24, 1937) is an American writer.

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 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.”

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
• 1991 Robert Indiana prints: a catalogue raisonne, 1951-1991
• 1993 Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

Family

She is the wife of journalist Neil Sheehan, 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 live in Washington, DC.