Diana Chang

Barnard Digital Collections ( direct link ) · Public domain
- Born
- 1924
- Died
- 2009 · Pennsylvania.
- Nationality
- United States
- Occupation
- novelist · poet · writer
- Education
- Barnard College
In this article
Key facts
• Name — Diana Chang
• Died — 2009 2 19
• Occupation — Novelist
• Genre — Novel, poetry
• Notable Works — The Frontiers of Love
• Education — Barnard College
Diana Chang (; 1924 – February 19, 2009) was a Chinese American novelist and poet. She is best known for her novel The Frontiers of Love, one of the earliest novels by an Asian American woman. She is considered to be the first American-born Chinese to publish a novel in the United States.
Early life
Chang was born in New York City to a Chinese father, Kuang Chi Chang, and Eurasian mother, Eva Mary Lee Wah Chang, and spent her youngest years in China, including Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai. She attended high school in New York, and graduated cum laude from Barnard College in 1949 where she majored in English, focusing on British and American poets. While an undergraduate at Barnard, Chang had 3 of her poems published by Poetry Magazine, including "At The Window."
Career
After graduation, Chang worked as a book editor at three publishing houses: Avon Books, Bobbs-Merrill, A. A. Wyn). She also worked as the editor for the PEN-sponsored journal American Pen and as a creative writing teacher at Barnard College.
Literary work
Chang's best known work is The Frontiers of Love. Her work has more recently been read in terms of postmodernity and hybridity. Although critical work on Chang has increased since the republication of Frontiers, critics have preferred to examine her Asian-themed works; her "white" novels are only recently getting attention.
While at Barnard College, Chang published her poem, Mood in Modern Poetry Association's Poetry.
Personal life
Chang lived in Water Mill, NY with her husband David Hermann.
She died on February 19, 2009.
Novels
• The Frontiers of Love, (1956, reissued 1974)
• A Woman of Thirty (1959)
• A Passion for Life (1961)
• The Only Game in Town (1963)
• Eye to Eye (1974)
• A Perfect Love (1978)
Poetry
• Saying Yes (Unknown)
• The Horizon is Definitely Speaking (1982)
• What Matisse is After (1984)
• Earth Water Light (1991)
Licensing
Text attribution
Part of the biographical narrative on this page reuses licensed material. Its origin, revision and licence are recorded here.
The biographical narrative on this page is based on the Wikipedia article Diana Chang, revision 1372263804 (EN edition), by its contributors. VALÉORINE has edited that text and built its own documentary record around it. The reused material is available under CC BY-SA 4.0, and this page's reuse of it is offered under the same licence. Everything else on this page — the chronology, the holdings, the evidence, the plates and the connections — is VALÉORINE's own record.
Awards
• Fulbright
• John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship
• Mademoiselle Magazine Woman-of-the-Year
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Diana Chang Papers. www.stonybrook.edu.
- 2.Roh-Spaulding, Carol. Asian American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group. 38–43. 2000. 978-03-1330-911-3.
- 3.Barnard Archives. 13 August 2008.
- 4.Hamalian, Leo. A MELUS Interview: Diana Chang. Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. 20. 4. 29–43. December 1995. 10.2307/467888.
- 5.Chang, Diana. Three Poems. Poetry Foundation. Poetry. January 2024.
Bibliography printed in the source article · 7
- Baringer, Sandra. "'The Hybrids and the Cosmopolitans': Race, Gender, and Masochism in Diana Chang's The Frontiers of Love" pp. 107–21 IN: Brennan, Jonathan (ed. and introd.); Mixed Race Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP; 2002.
- Fink, Thomas; "Chang's 'Plunging into View'" Explicator, 1997 Spring; 55 (3): 175–77.
- Grice, Helena. "Diana Chang" pp. 30–35 IN: Madsen, Deborah L. (ed. and introd.); Asian American Writers. Detroit, MI: Gale; 2005.
- Grice, Helena. "Face-ing/De-Face-ing Racism: Physiognomy as Ethnic Marker in Early Eurasian/Amerasian Women's Texts" pp. 255–70 IN: Lee, Josephine (ed.); Lim, Imogene L. (ed.); Matsukawa, Yuko (ed.); Re/Collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP; 2002.
- Ling, Amy; "Writer in the Hyphenated Condition: Diana Chang" MELUS, 1980 Winter; 7 (4): 69–83.
- Spaulding, Carol Vivian; Blue-Eyed Asians: Eurasianism in the Work of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, and Diana Chang. Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 1997 Jan; 57 (7): 3024–25. U of Iowa, 1996.
- Wu, Wei-hsiung Kitty; Cultural Ideology and Aesthetic Choices: A Study of Three Works by Chinese-American Women—Diana Chang, Bette Bao Lord, and Maxine H. Kingston. Dissertation Abstracts International, 1990 June; 50 (12): 3956A.
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
reference work
Partially resolvedreference work
Partially resolved
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 21 August 2026.
Elsewhere in Books
37,093 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
- Diana ArbeninaAuthor
- Diana AthillAuthor
- Diana BarrymoreAuthor
- Diana BrebnerAuthor
- Diana Der HovanessianAuthor
- Diana EvansAuthor
- Diana FerrusAuthor
- Diana GabaldonAuthor
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