Snake Pit

A 75th anniversary edition of the landmark novel that forever changed the way we think about mental illness and its treatment

Do you hear voices? Virginia Stuart Cunningham, a journalist and novelist with a wicked sense of humor, is sitting on a park bench waiting for her husband when an intrusive stranger begins to pester her with nonsensical questions. Is he mad? Or is she? So begins this brilliant literary exploration of mental illness, a novel that asks us to reconsider what counts as sanity in a crazy world. 

Suffering a breakdown in 1941, thirty-five-year-old novelist Mary Jane Ward was diagnosed, or perhaps misdiagnosed, with schizophrenia and committed to a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York. From that horrific experience came this gripping story.

Inspiration for the 1948 film starring Olivia de Havilland, The Snake Pit sparked important investigative journalism and state legislation to reform the care and treatment of people with mental illness. It belongs in the company of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—two books it influenced.

This authoritative Library of America edition includes an afterword by Ward’s cousin, Larry Lockridge, and a Reading Group Guide featuring additional material about Ward and the real-life roots of the novel.

Mary Jane Ward (1905-1981) was the author of nine novels, including her three autobiographical novels that concern mental illness and its treatment--The Snake Pit (1946), Counterclockwise (1969), and The Other Caroline (1970). Her papers are held at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Larry Lockridge is Professor Emeritus of English at New York University, and has held Danforth, Woodrow Wilson, and Guggenheim fellowships. He is the author of several books, including a biography of his father, Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., Author of Raintree County.