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.[1][2] Her stories home in on the everyday conflicts and heartbreaks of city life, heavily informed by her childhood in the Bronx.[3]
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."[1]
Early life and education
Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx, to Jewish parents, Isaac Goodside and the former Manya Ridnyik, who were originally from Ukraine, and were socialists—especially her mother.[2][4] They had immigrated 16–17 years before (in 1906, by one account[2])[4]—following a period, under the rule of the 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.[2]
The family spoke Russian and Yiddish in the home, and eventually English (which her father learned "by reading Dickens").[4] 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.[2] Fourteen years younger than her sister, Jeanne, and sixteen years younger than her brother, Victor, Grace was described as being a tomboy as a child.[5] 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.[6]
After dropping out of high school at sixteen,[6] Grace Goodside attended Hunter College for a year (spanning 1938-1939[7]), then married a film cameraman, Jess Paley, when she was 19,[2] on June 20, 1942.[5] The Paleys had two children, Nora (born 1949) and Danny (born 1951), but later divorced.[6][8] 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...[4]
Paley studied briefly with W. H. Auden, at the New School, when she was seventeen,[5] pursuing a hope to be a poet.[2] She did not receive a degree from either institution.[6]
Writing
Early in her writing career, Paley experienced a number of rejections for her submitted works.[6] She published her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) with Doubleday.[2] 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.[9][6][10][11] 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.[10] Despite an initial lack of publicity, Little Disturbances developed a sufficient following for it to be reissued by Viking Press in 1968.[12]
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.[7]
With the encouragement of her friend and neighbor Donald Barthelme,[6][4] Paley assembled a second collection of fiction in 1974, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.[2] 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.[9] 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.[9] The collection's shifting narrative voice, metafictive qualities and fragmented, incomplete plots have led some critics to classify it as a postmodernist work.[2][13][14][15][16]
In Later the Same Day (1985), also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux,[2] Paley continues the stories of Faith and her neighbors—but somewhat expanded, with the addition of more black and lesbian voices.[9][17]
Her work has been characterized as dealing with the day-to-day triumphs and tragedies of "women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers."[2] As one editor who worked with Paley wrote, "Her characters are people who smell of onions, yell at each other, mourn in darkened kitchens."[18] 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."[19]
Her sharp dialogue is marked by the rhythms of Yiddish, and her stories tend to reflect the "shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit."[2]
Although more widely known for her short fiction, Paley also published several volumes of poetry including Leaning Forward (1985)[20] and New and Collected Poems (1992).[21] In 1991 she published Long Walks and Intimate Talks, which combined poems and prose writing,[22] and in 2001 she released the collection Begin Again: Collected Poems, which assembled work from throughout her life.[23][24]
Her final book, the poetry collection Fidelity, was published posthumously in 2008.[26]
Academic career
Paley began to teach writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1966 (through to 1989)[27] and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in the late 1960s.[28] She subsequently served on the faculty at City College and taught courses at Columbia University.[4] She also taught at Syracuse University[29] and served as vice president of the PEN American Center,[2] an organization she'd worked to diversify in the 1980s.[17] 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."[28]
Political activism
Paley was known for pacifism and for political activism.[2] 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."[18] The FBI declared her a communist and kept a file on her for thirty years.[6]
With the escalation of the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League.[36] She was arrested on a number of occasions, including spending a week in the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village.[7] In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War,[37] 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.[38] She served as a delegate to the 1973 World Peace Conference in Moscow[3][39] 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.[34] In the 1980s Paley supported efforts to improve human rights and resist U.S. military intervention in Central America,[40][41][42] and she continued to speak out in her final years against the Iraq War.[17]
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.[7]
Personal life and final years
Though 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,[8] she was raised agnostic, with her father refusing to go to temple entirely.[7][6] She described herself as a bigger believer in the Jewish diaspora than in Jewish nationhood, emphasizing: "I was never a Zionist."[7]
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.[43][6][17] She married fellow poet and anti-war activist Robert Nichols later that year.[44] The couple published a joint book expressing their shared activism through poetry and prose, Here and Somewhere Else, in 2007.[2][45]
Paley was a decades-long resident of West 11th Street in New York's Greenwich Village, where she raised her children, Nora and Danny.[18] She did not learn to drive until she was 55.[3] Paley began spending summers in Thetford, Vermont, with Nichols beginning in the 1970s; the couple eventually settled there permanently in the early '90s.[4][8]
Paley died at the age of 84, after undergoing treatment for breast cancer for some time.[2] She left behind her husband, her two children and three grandchildren.[2] 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."[17]
Awards and recognition
Paley's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction (1961)[46] and the Edith Wharton Award Certification of Merit (1986).[47] She won an O'Henry Award in 1969 for her story "Distance."[48] She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980.[49]
Paley went on to receive the Rea Award for the Short Story (1993),[50][51] the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1993),[52]PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction (1994)[53] and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award (1994).[54] Paley received an honorary degree from Dartmouth University in 1998.[55][56]
She was named the first official New York State Author in 1986,[47] and she was also named poet laureate of Vermont in 2003.[2][17]
In 2003, she received the Robert Creeley Award.[57] In 2004, as a part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, Paley received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature.[58] At Dartmouth College's annual Social Justice Awards ceremony in 2006, Paley received the Lester B. Granger '18 Award for Lifetime Achievement.[55]
In 1988, the American composer Christian Wolff set eight poems from Leaning Forward (1985) for soprano, bass-baritone, clarinet/bass-clarinet, and cello.[61] 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.[62]
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.[63][64] The film contains interviews with Paley and friends, footage of her political activities, and readings from her fiction and poetry.[64]
^ abcdefghijSchwartz, Alexandra. "The Art and Activism of Grace Paley". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2020-09-03.. Note that the print version of this article is titled "Believe you me : Grace Paley's neighborhood".
^BABA, MINAKO (1988). "Faith Darwin as Writer-Heroine: A Study of Grace Paley's Short Stories". Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-). 7 (1): 40–54. ISSN0271-9274. JSTOR41205673.
^SAC, New York (100-161242)(C) (February 21, 1968). "Memorandum—Subject: Writers and Editors—War Tax Protest—Information Concerning (IS)"(FBI memorandum and photocopied attachment [4 pp.]). Archive.org. Retrieved March 7, 2020. Attached hereto, per the Bureau's request, are two Xrox copies of the advertisement referred to in the "New York Times" edition of 1/31/68. This advertisement appeared in the "New York Post", 1/30/68, page 51. [p. 1 of 4] / '...Grace Paley...' [p. 3 of 4]((cite web)): CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) See also Abel, Bob; Nelson Algren; et al. (January 30, 1968). "If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year..."(advertisement). New York Post: 51. Retrieved March 7, 2020.
