Ferro, Robert

Robert Michael Ferro was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on October 21, 1941. The son of Michael and Gae Panzera Ferro, he was raised in nearby Cranford, New Jersey, with his siblings Michael Jr., Camille, and Beth. While his father was born in America, Ferro's mother had immigrated in 1914 from Italy, a country that would figure prominently in her son’s life and writings.

Ferro attended public school in Cranford and in 1963 received a BA in English from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. After graduation, determined to become a writer, he lived for a year in Florence, Italy, where he studied Italian and wrote fiction. Ferro enrolled at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in the fall of 1965; there he studied with the Chilean novelist Jose Donoso and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1967. During his final semester at Iowa, Ferro met Michael Grumley (1941-1988), also a student at the Writers' Workshop, and the two began a two-decade-long personal and professional partnership. Known to their friends as “the Ferro-Grumleys,” the couple lived primarily on New York’s Upper West Side, but also spent extended periods of time in Rome and London. The Ferro family owned an oceanfront home at Sea Girt, New Jersey, which was a place that held particular significance for Robert Ferro: he named the house with a double entendre, “Gaewyck,” and designed extensive improvement campaigns for the property. As recorded in Michael Grumley’s engagement calendars and daily journals, the pair regularly stayed at the shore house, where they gardened, cooked, read books, and entertained friends and family, while still carving out time to work on their writing projects.

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