Alix Kates Shulman

Alix Kates Shulman (born August 17, 1932) is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best-known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."

Her books have been translated into 12 languages. She has taught writing and women's literature widely in the U.S., including at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu), where she held the Citizens Chair, New York University, The New School, the University of Southern Maine, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Yale University. She received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Case Western Reserve University in 2001.

Shulman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 17, 1932, to Dorothy Davis Kates, a community organizer, and Samuel Simon Kates, a labor arbitrator. Her family is Jewish.

After attending Cleveland Heights public schools, in 1953 she received a BA in history and philosophy from Western Reserve University. She then moved to New York City to study philosophy at the Columbia University Graduate School and later received an MA in Humanities from New York University. She was an early member of the feminist organization Redstockings.

Shulman first emerged as the author of the controversial essay "A Marriage Agreement", which proposed that women and men split childcare and housework equally, and detailed a way of doing so. Originally published in the small feminist journal Up From Under in August 1970, it was widely reprinted in large-circulation mainstream magazines like Life and Redbook, as well as in the premier issue of Ms. magazine; it subsequently appeared in a number of anthologies, including a Harvard textbook on contract law.

Following several children's books, Shulman's first adult novel, the seriocomic million-copy Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), was published. A feminist classic, it is the coming-of-age story, from childhood through motherhood, of middle-class, white, sexually precocious and emotionally confused Sasha Davis, as she navigates the pressures, discrimination, and absurdities facing a pre-feminist mid-20th-century young woman of ambition. Almost continuously in print since 1972, it was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 1997 by Penguin, a 35th anniversary "Feminist Classics" edition in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG), as an e-book in 2012 by Open Road, and in many foreign language editions.

Her next book, Burning Questions (Knopf, 1978), is a historical novel about the rise of the women's liberation movement in late 1960s New York City, an experience Shulman knew firsthand. A fictional autobiography of a white middle-class rebel conscious of class ironies, the novel presents the new movement in a historical tradition of radical and revolutionary women, and “chronicles the important changes in women’s lives and consciousness wrought by contemporary feminism.” A 2017 literary blog described Burning Questions as "the best, most accurate historical novel I have read about the Women's Liberation Movement."

On the Stroll (Knopf, 1981), her third novel, takes on the themes of homelessness, sexual exploitation, and prostitution through the story of a shopping-bag lady and a teenage runaway who is preyed upon by a pimp, over the course of one summer.