Born as
June Rossbach in
White Plains, New York. She was the daughter of Mabel Limburg and Max J.H. Rossbach. She was the grand niece of New York Governor
Herbert H. Lehman, for whom the
Lehman College is named. Her maternal grandmother was Clara Lehman Limburg, and her great-grandfather was
Mayer Lehman, one of the founders of the
Lehman Brothers firm. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from
Barnard College in 1940. 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. ==Personal life and death==