June Bingham Birge

June Bingham Birge (June 20, 1919 – August 21, 2007) was an author and playwright.

Born as June Rossbach in White Plains, New York, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Barnard College in 1940. In 1939, she married Jonathan Brewster Bingham, who served in Congress from 1965 to 1983 as a Democrat representing The Bronx; he died in 1986.

Ms. Birge wrote several non-fiction books, including Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (Scribner, 1961); U Thant: The Search for Peace (Knopf, 1966); and, with Norman Tamarkin, The Pursuit of Health (Walker, 1985).

Her plays included a musical, Asylum: The Strange Case of Mary Lincoln, and a play about the women around Franklin D. Roosevelt, Triangles.

Death
June Bingham Birge died at her home in Riverdale, The Bronx, aged 88, from cancer. She was survived by her second husband, Robert Bowen Birge, whom she married in 1987; three children; a stepson; 10 grandchildren; 2 step-grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. A daughter from her first marriage, the Rev. June Mitchell Esselstyn, died in 1999.