I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg: 9780143136996 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books (2024)

The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman’s struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword byEsmé Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author

A Penguin Classic

After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her “normal” life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge.

A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar–a very different portrait of psychological breakdown–I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century later, a timeless and ultimately hopeful book, ripe for rediscovery by a new generation eager to erase the stigma of mental illness.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.

The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman’s struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword byEsmé Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author

A Penguin Classic

After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her “normal” life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge.

A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar–a very different portrait of psychological breakdown–I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century later, a timeless and ultimately hopeful book, ripe for rediscovery by a new generation eager to erase the stigma of mental illness.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.