Pauline Leader papers, 1930-2020

Pauline Leader (October 16, 1908 – July 13, 2001) was a deaf American writer and poet. She was one the first deaf authors to achieve mass market success. Her memoir, And No Birds Sing (published 1931, republished 2016), offers stories of a Bohemian New York told from a deaf perspective.

Leader was born into a Jewish family in Bennington, Vermont. She had four younger siblings – three sisters and one brother: Sadie (1909-1959), Mary (1911-1991), Eva (1916-), and Herbert (1917-1989). She became deaf in 1921 as an after-effect of contracting meningitis. With few resources for deaf individuals, traditional schooling would not accommodate Leader's needs, resulting in her expulsion from Bennington Public Schools. Her parents were unwilling to send her to a speciality school and would often hide her coat and shoes to prevent her from going out. Much of Leader's education after middle school was self-taught. She fled from her family home at the age of 17 to become a writer in New York City, trying to find her place amongst the Bohemians.

In the late 1920s, she began a relationship with Henry Lavarack after meeting the industrial designer at a poetry reading. Leader was 20 at the time, and Lavarack was 30 years her senior (and was still married). In 1930, the couple moved to Woodstock, New York, and in the same year, they had a daughter named Elinor (1931-1984).

In 1931, Leader's memoir, And No Birds Sing, was accepted for publication by Vanguard Press. It was originally titled The Gnome and the People. It was submitted to Columbia University by Vanguard as a selection for the Pulitzer Prize. The memoir received mixed reviews; Leader was often criticized for her negative tone.

She received a considerable amount of fanmail that went unanswered, and when prompted agreed to answer the one she felt was best written. This admirer was writer Millen Brand, who Leader wrote back to thinking that he was a woman. They kept up correspondence and Leader eventually invited him to her and Lavarack's home. Once they met, Brand and Leader quickly fell in love and married in 1932. Lavarack reportedly approved of the marriage, and Brand adopted Elinor. Leader and Brand had two more children, Jonathan (1933-2023) and Daniel (1937-).

In April 1939, the Brand family moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania. Leader and Brand separated by September of that year, and Pauline moved back to New York City with the children. She wrote and tried to publish two more novels, Roses Grow Deep and A Song for My Land, during this period, but they were rejected. It is thought that these manuscripts were lost or destroyed.

In 1942, she moved back to Bennington, Vermont, where Leader had extended family that could help look after the children. Brand paid only a minimal alimony and Leader worked in factories to support her family, often picking up nightshifts and doubleshifts. Nonetheless, the family experienced significant poverty. After World War Two, Leader and her children moved back to Manhattan, where they lived in a cold water flat in Hell's Kitchen. She worked a clerical job and circulated an unpublished play among Broadway producers, but it was never picked up.

She and her children then returned to Bennington, Vermont. Leader worked in a textile mill before taking a year off of factory work to write A Room for the Night, which was published in 1946 by Vanguard. She then returned to factory work in a shoe factory. Leader valued her children's education and pushed her children to succeed. She helped put her son, Daniel, through MIT. Pauline Leader died on July 13th, 2001 in Portland, Oregon, where her son, Jonathan, lived.

Pauline Leader was one the first deaf authors to achieve mass market success. Her most well-known work, And No Birds Sing, first published in 1931 by Vanguard Press, earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Leader's work has been cited by disability activists and scholars, as well as by lesbian scholars, the latter in part due to what Mara Mills, director of NYU's Center for Disability Study, terms Leader's "keen eye for glimpses of homosexuality." And No Birds Sing was republished in 2016 by Gallaudet University Press with a new introduction and afterword by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez.

Sources: And No Birds Sing, foreword by Mara Mills (republished in 2016) Family history documents found in the collection