In Memoriam: Marilyn Yalom, 1932-2019

Marilyn Yalom, a gender studies scholar and author, died at her home in Palo Alto, California, on November 20. She was 87 years old and had suffered from cancer.

Dr. Yalom was born in Chicago and later grew up in Washington D.C. She earned a bachelor’s degree in French from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She held a master’s degree in French and German from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins University.

After a brief stint at the University of Hawaii, Dr. Yalom taught at California State University, Hayward (now CSU, East Bay) from 1963 to 1976. In 1976, she was hired as deputy director of the Center for Research on Women at Stanford University. Later, she was a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, where she served as director from 1984 to 1985.

Dr. Yalom was the author of many books including How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance (Harper, 2012) and her latest work The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love (Basic Books, 2018).