Template:Short description Template:Infobox writer Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007), Template:Nee Goodside, was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.
Paley wrote three critically acclaimed collections of short stories, which were compiled in the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Collected Stories in 1994.<ref name=":7">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823">Template:Cite journal</ref> Her stories home in on the everyday conflicts and heartbreaks of city life, heavily informed by her childhood in the Bronx.<ref name=":8" />
Beyond her work as an author and university professor, Paley was a feminist and anti-war activist, describing herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."<ref name=":7" />
Early life and educationEdit
Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx, to Jewish parents, Isaac Goodside and Manya Goodside (née Ridnyik), who were originally from Ukraine, and espoused socialism, especially her mother.<ref name = FoxNYTobit20070823/><ref name = DeeJonesMacFarquarParisRev1992>Template:Cite journal</ref> They had immigrated 16 or 17 years earlier (in 1906, by one account<ref name = FoxNYTobit20070823/>),<ref name = DeeJonesMacFarquarParisRev1992/> following a period under the rule of Ukraine by Czar Nicholas II that saw their exile, her mother to Germany and her father to Siberia—with the change of name from Gutseit as they began their new life in New York.<ref name = FoxNYTobit20070823/>
The family spoke Russian and Yiddish in the home, and eventually English (which her father learned "by reading Dickens").<ref name = DeeJonesMacFarquarParisRev1992/> Isaac trained and became a doctor in New York, and the couple had two children early, and a third, Grace, as they approached middle age.<ref name = FoxNYTobit20070823/> Fourteen years younger than her sister, Jeanne, and 16 years younger than her brother, Victor, Grace was described as being a tomboy as a child.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite journal</ref> As a child she was tuned in to the intellectual debates of the adults around her, and she was a member of the Falcons, a socialist youth group.<ref name=":1" />
After dropping out of high school at sixteen,<ref name=":1" /> Grace Goodside attended Hunter College for a year (spanning 1938 and 1939<ref name=":3">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web
}}</ref>), then married a film cameraman, Jess Paley, when she was 19,<ref name = FoxNYTobit20070823/> on June 20, 1942.<ref name=":0" /> The Paleys had two children, Nora (born 1949) and Danny (born 1951), but later divorced.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite magazine. Note that the print version of this article is titled "Believe you me : Grace Paley's neighborhood".</ref><ref name=":9">Template:Cite news</ref> Writing to introduce an interview in The Paris Review, Jonathan Dee, Barbara Jones, and Larissa MacFarquhar note that
Writing has only occasionally been Paley’s main occupation. She spent a lot of time in playgrounds when her children were young. She has always been very active in the feminist and peace movements...<ref name = DeeJonesMacFarquarParisRev1992/>
Paley studied briefly with W. H. Auden, at the New School, when she was 17,<ref name=":0" /> pursuing a hope to be a poet.<ref name = FoxNYTobit20070823/> She did not receive a degree from either institution.<ref name=":1" />
WritingEdit
Early in her writing career, Paley experienced a number of rejections for her submitted works.<ref name=":1" /> She published her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) with Doubleday.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /> The collection features eleven stories of New York life, several of which have since been widely anthologized, particularly "Goodbye and Good Luck" and "The Used-Boy Raisers," and introduces the semi-autobiographical character "Faith Darwin" (in "The Used-Boy Raisers" and "A Subject of Childhood")—who later appears in six stories of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and nine of Later the Same Day.<ref name=":4">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=":1" /><ref name=":5">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Though as a story collection by an unknown author the book was not widely reviewed, those who did review it, including Philip Roth and The New Yorker book page, tended to rate the stories highly.<ref name=":5" /> Despite an initial lack of publicity, Little Disturbances developed a sufficient following for it to be reissued by Viking Press in 1968.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Following the success of Little Disturbances, Paley's publisher encouraged her to write a novel, but she gave up on the attempt after tinkering with drafts for two years. She instead continued to focus on short stories.<ref name=":3" />
With the encouragement of her friend and neighbor Donald Barthelme,<ref name=":1" /><ref name="DeeJonesMacFarquarParisRev1992" /> Paley assembled a second collection of fiction in 1974, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /> This collection of seventeen stories features several recurring characters from Little Disturbances (most notably the narrator "Faith," but also including John Raftery and his mother), while continuing Paley's exploration of racial, gender, and class issues.<ref name=":4" /> The long story "Faith in a Tree," positioned roughly at the center of the collection, brings a number of characters and themes from the stories together on a Saturday afternoon at the park; in it, Faith, the narrator, climbs a tree to get a broader perspective on both her neighbors and the "man-wide world" and, after encountering several war protesters, declares a new social and political commitment.<ref name=":4" /> The collection's shifting narrative voice, metafictive qualities and fragmented, incomplete plots have led some critics to classify it as a postmodernist work.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>
In Later the Same Day (1985), also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux,<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /> Paley continues the stories of Faith and her neighbors—but somewhat expanded, with the addition of more black and lesbian voices.<ref name=":4" /><ref name=":10">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Paley's stories were regathered in a volume from Farrar, Straus in 1994, The Collected Stories, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" />
Her work has been characterized as dealing with the day-to-day triumphs and tragedies of "women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers."<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /> As one editor who worked with Paley wrote, "Her characters are people who smell of onions, yell at each other, mourn in darkened kitchens."<ref name=":11">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web
}}</ref> She wrote what she knew:
"I couldn’t help the fact that I had not gone to war, and I had not done the male things. I had lived a woman’s life and that’s what I wrote about."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation
|CitationClass=web
}}</ref>
Her sharp dialogue is marked by the rhythms of Yiddish, and her stories tend to reflect the "shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit."<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" />
Although more widely known for her short fiction, Paley also published several volumes of poetry including Leaning Forward (1985)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and New and Collected Poems (1992).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In 1991 she published Long Walks and Intimate Talks, which combined poems and prose writing,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and in 2001 she released the collection Begin Again: Collected Poems, which assembled work from throughout her life.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Paley published an essay collection, Just As I Thought, in 1999.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}Template:Dead link</ref> She also contributed the piece "Why Peace Is (More Than Ever) a Feminist Issue" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.<ref name=":11" />
Her final book, the poetry collection Fidelity, was published posthumously in 2008.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Academic careerEdit
Paley began to teach writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1966 (through to 1989)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in the late 1960s.<ref name=":2">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She subsequently served on the faculty at City College and taught courses at Columbia University.<ref name="DeeJonesMacFarquarParisRev1992" /> She also taught at Syracuse University<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web
}}</ref> and served as vice president of the PEN American Center,<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /> an organization she'd worked to diversify in the 1980s.<ref name=":10" /> Paley summarized her view of teaching during a symposium on "Educating the Imagination," sponsored by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1996:
"Our idea was that children—by writing, by putting down words, by reading, by beginning to love literature, by the inventiveness of listening to one another—could begin to understand the world better and begin to make a better world for themselves. That always seemed to me such a natural idea that I’ve never understood why it took so much aggressiveness and so much time to get it started."<ref name=":2" />
Political activismEdit
Paley was known for pacifism and for political activism.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /> Her fellow feminist activist Robin Morgan described Paley's activism as broadly focused on social justice: "civil-rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear, feminist, whatever needed revolution."<ref name=":11" /> The FBI declared her a communist and kept a file on her for thirty years.<ref name=":1" />
Beginning in the 1950s, Paley joined friends in protesting nuclear proliferation and American militarization.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She also worked with the American Friends Service Committee to establish neighborhood peace groups,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> helping found the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961.<ref name=":10" /><ref name=":12" /> She met her second husband, Robert Nichols, through the anti-Vietnam War peace movement.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
With the escalation of the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She was arrested on a number of occasions, including spending a week in the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village.<ref name=":3" /> In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War,<ref name="FBI">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }} See also Template:Cite journal</ref> and in 1969 she came to national prominence as an activist when she accompanied a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She served as a delegate to the 1973 World Peace Conference in Moscow<ref name=":8">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and was arrested in 1978 as one of "The White House Eleven" for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner that read "No Nuclear Weapons—No Nuclear Power—USA and USSR" on the White House lawn.<ref name=":12">Template:Cite book</ref> In the 1980s Paley supported efforts to improve human rights and resist U.S. military intervention in Central America,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}Template:Better source needed</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> and she continued to speak out in her final years against the Iraq War.<ref name=":10" />
Among Paley's many other causes was abortion rights, part of her broader feminist work. She organized one of the first "abortion speak-outs" in the 1960s after having an abortion herself in the 1950s and then struggling to obtain a second one a few years later.<ref name=":3" />
Personal life and final yearsEdit
Paley's Jewish background was a vital part of her identity and work, and she found community in her local synagogue in Vermont in her later years,<ref name=":9" /> she was raised agnostic, with her father refusing to go to temple entirely.<ref name=":3" /><ref name=":1" /> She described herself as a bigger believer in the Jewish diaspora than in Jewish nationhood, emphasizing: "I was never a Zionist."<ref name=":3" />
Paley's first marriage, to the cinematographer Jess Paley, ended in divorce in 1972 after the couple separated five years prior, though the two remained close friends.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=":1" /><ref name=":10" /> She married fellow poet and anti-war activist Robert Nichols later that year.<ref name="AmateauVillager2010">The two were together at the time of Paley's death. See Template:Cite journal</ref> The couple published a joint book expressing their shared activism through poetry and prose, Here and Somewhere Else, in 2007.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Paley was a decades-long resident of West 11th Street in New York's Greenwich Village, where she raised her children, Nora and Danny.<ref name=":11" /> She did not learn to drive until she was 55.<ref name=":8" /> Paley began spending summers in Thetford, Vermont, with Nichols beginning in the 1970s; the couple eventually settled there permanently in the early '90s.<ref name="DeeJonesMacFarquarParisRev1992" /><ref name=":9" />
Paley died at the age of 84, after undergoing treatment for breast cancer for some time.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /> She left behind her husband, her two children and three grandchildren.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /> In an interview given in the year of her death, in May 2007, Paley spoke of the dreams she had for her grandchildren, stating the desire for "a world without militarism and racism and greed—and where women don't have to fight for their place in the world."<ref name=":10" />
Awards and recognitionEdit
Paley's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction (1961)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and the Edith Wharton Award Certification of Merit (1986).<ref name=":13">Template:Cite news</ref> She won an O'Henry Award in 1969 for her story "Distance."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Paley went on to receive the Rea Award for the Short Story (1993),<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1993),<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction (1994)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award (1994).<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Paley received an honorary degree from Dartmouth University in 1998.<ref name = VoxStaff20060123>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
She was named the first official New York State Author in 1986,<ref name=":13" /> and she was also named poet laureate of Vermont in 2003.<ref name="FoxNYTobit20070823" /><ref name=":10" />
In 2003, she received the Robert Creeley Award.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 2004, as a part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, Paley received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> At Dartmouth College's annual Social Justice Awards ceremony in 2006, Paley received the Lester B. Granger '18 Award for Lifetime Achievement.<ref name = VoxStaff20060123/>
The Grace Paley Prize, a literary award, is presented by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in her honor.<ref name="McGrathCourse">Template:Cite journal</ref>
Homages and adaptationsEdit
The three-part drama film Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, based on Paley's collection of the same name, was released in 1983.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 1988, the American composer Christian Wolff set eight poems from Leaning Forward (1985) for soprano, bass-baritone, clarinet/bass-clarinet, and cello.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> The story "Goodbye and Good Luck" from The Little Disturbances of Man was adapted as a musical by Melba Thomas (story), Muriel Robinson (lyrics), and David Friedman (music); it was performed as a staged reading in New York in 1994.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
A documentary film titled Grace Paley: Collected Shorts (2009), directed by Lily Rivlin, was presented at the Woodstock International Film Festival and other festivals in 2010.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name=":6">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The film contains interviews with Paley and friends, footage of her political activities, and readings from her fiction and poetry.<ref name=":6" />
BibliographyEdit
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BooksEdit
- The Little Disturbances of Man (short stories, 1959)
- A Subject of Childhood and a conversation with the author in New sounds in American fiction editor Gordon Lish (1969)
- Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (short stories, 1974)
- Later the Same Day (short stories, 1985)
- Leaning Forward (poetry, 1985)
- 365 Reasons Not to Have Another War (with Vera Williams, nonfiction, War Resisters League 1989 Peace Calendar)
- Long Walks and Intimate Talks (stories and poems, 1991)
- New and Collected Poems (1992)
- The Collected Stories (1994)
- Just As I Thought (semiautobiographical collection of articles, reports, and talks, 1998)
- Begin Again: Collected Poems (2000)
- Fidelity (2008), posthumous
Critical studies and reviews of Paley's workEdit
- Template:Cite magazine<ref group=lower-alpha>Online version is titled "The art and activism of Grace Paley".</ref>
———————
- Notes
Short storiesEdit
Title | Publication | Collected in |
---|---|---|
"Goodbye and Good Luck" | Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature (Summer 1956) | The Little Disturbances of Man |
"The Contest" | Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature (1958) | |
"A Woman, Young and Old" | The Little Disturbances of Man (April 1959) | |
"The Pale Pink Roast" | ||
"The Loudest Voice" | ||
"An Interest in Life" | ||
"An Irrevocable Diameter" | ||
"Two Short Sad Stories from a Long Happy Life "1. The Used-Boy Raisers "2. A Subject of Childhood" | ||
"In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All" | ||
"The Floating Truth" | ||
"Faith in the Afternoon" | The Noble Savage (September 1960) | Enormous Changes at the Last Minute |
"Gloomy Tune" | Genesis West (Fall 1962) | |
"Living" | Genesis West (Winter 1965) | |
"Northeast Playground" | Ararat Quarterly #8 (1967) | |
"Faith in a Tree" | New American Review #1 (September 1967) | |
"Distance" | The Atlantic (December 1967) | |
"Come On, Ye Sons of Art" | Sarah Lawrence Journal (Winter 1968) | |
"Samuel" | Esquire (March 1968) ("Two Stories from Five Boroughs") | |
"The Burdened Man" | ||
"Politics" | Win #4 (1968) | |
"Debts" | The Atlantic (May 1971) ("Two Stories") | |
"Wants" | ||
"A Conversation with My Father" | New American Review #13 (1971) | |
"The Immigrant Story" | Fiction 1.3 (1972) | |
"Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" | The Atlantic (May 1972) | |
"The Little Girl" | The Paris Review #57 (Spring 1974) | |
"The Long Distance Runner" | Esquire (March 1974) | |
"In the Garden" | Fiction 4.2 (1976) | Later the Same Day |
"This Is a Story About My Friend George, the Toy Inventor" | Transatlantic Review #58/59 (1977) | |
"Dreamer in a Dead Language" | American Review #26 (November 1977) | |
"Somewhere Else" | The New Yorker (October 23, 1978) | |
"Friends" | The New Yorker (June 18, 1979) | |
"Love" | The New Yorker (October 8, 1979) | |
"Ruthy and Edie" a.k.a. "Edie and Ruthy" |
Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 3.1 (1980) | |
"A Man Told Me the Story of His Life" | Poets & Writers (1980) | |
"Mother" a.k.a. "My Mother" | Ms. (1980) | |
"At That Time, or The History of a Joke" | The Iowa Review #12 (1981) | |
"Lavinia: An Old Story" | Delta #14 (1982) | |
"The Story Hearer" | Mother Jones (December 1982) | |
"Anxiety" | New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly 5.4 (Summer 1983) | |
"In This Country, But in Another Language, My Aunt Refuses to Marry the Men Everyone Wants Her To" | The Threepenny Review (Winter 1983) | |
"The Expensive Moment" a.k.a. "The Unknown Parts of Far, Imaginable Places" |
Mother Jones (December 1983) | |
"Zagrowsky Tells" a.k.a. "Telling" |
Mother Jones (May 1985) | |
"Listening" | Later the Same Day (Spring 1985) | |
"Midrash on Happiness" | TriQuarterly #65 (Winter 1986) | Long Walks and Intimate Talks |
"One Morning at Edie's" | Long Walks and Intimate Talks (1991) |
ReferencesEdit
Further readingEdit
- Template:Cite magazine
- Arcana, Judith. (1993). Grace Paley's life stories: a literary biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Template:ISBN. OCLC 25281685
- Lavers, Norman. "Grace Paley," Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Salem, 2001.
- Sorkin, Adam. "Grace Paley," Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 28: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers. Ed. Daniel Walden. Gale, 1984. pp. 225–231.
- Hopson, Jacqueline. Voices in Grace Paley's Short Stories. (Master's thesis) University of Exeter, School of English, 1990.
- Wilner, Paul. "Grace Paley, Short Story of Success", Westchester Weekly, New York Times, 1978.
- Wilner, Paul. "No Need for Sainthood: On Grace Paley's Enduring Humanity", The Millions, 2017.
External linksEdit
- Grace Paley at FSG
- The Miniaturist Art of Grace Paley by Joyce Carol Oates
- Interview with the War Resisters League
- Interview with Poets & Writers Magazine
- A Tribute to Grace Paley from PEN American Center, 2007
- 48th Congress of International PEN a floor conversation with Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood, and Norman Mailer, 1986