Grace Paley

Grace Paley (1922-2007). Courtesy ProQuest.

Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 - August 22, 2007) was a Jewish American poet, short story writer, and political activist.

Life

Paley was born Grace Goodside in the Bronx, New York City, to Manya (Ridnyik) and Isaac Goodside (who anglicized the family name from Gutseit on immigrating from Ukraine). Her father was a doctor. The family spoke Russian and Yiddish along with English. The youngest of the 3 Goodside children (16 and 14 years younger than brother and sister Victor and Jeanne, respectively), Paley was a tomboy as a child.

In 1938 and 1939, Paley attended Hunter College, then briefly The New School, but never received a degree. In the early 1940s, Paley studied with W.H. Auden at the New School for Social Research.

Academic career

Paley taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College from 1966 to 1989, and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in 1967. She also taught at Columbia University, Syracuse University and the City College of New York.

Paley summarized her view of teaching during a symposium on "Educating the Imagination" sponsored by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1996: "Our idea," Paley said, "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 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!"

Literary career

After a number of rejections, Paley published her debut collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) with Doubleday. Despite its initial lack of publicity, The Little Disturbances of Man went on to build a sufficient following for it to be reissued by Viking Press in 1968.

Following the success of Little Disturbances of Man, Paley's publisher encouraged her to write a novel. After several years of tinkering with drafts, Paley went back to short fiction. With the aid of Donald Barthelme, she assembled a 2nd collection of fiction in 1974, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

Political activism

Paley was known for pacifism and for political activism. She wrote about the complexities of women's and men's lives and advocated for what she said was the betterment of life for everyone. In the 1950s, Paley joined friends in protesting nuclear proliferation and American militarization. She also worked with the American Friends Service Committee to establish neighborhood peace groups, through which she met her husband Robert Nichols.

With the escalation of the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War, 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. She served as a delegate to the 1974 World Peace Conference in Moscow and, in 1978, was arrested 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.

Private life

On June 20, 1942, Grace Goodside married cinematographer Jess Paley, and had 2 children, Nora (1949-) and Danny (1951-). They later divorced. In 1972 Grace Paley married fellow poet (and author of the Nghsi-Altai series) Robert Nichols.

She died at home in Thetford, Vermont, at the age of 84 of breast cancer. In a May 2007 interview with Vermont Woman newspaper – among her last – Paley said of her dreams for her grandchildren: "It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don't have to fight for their place in the world."

Writing

Poetry

Auden's social concern and his heavy use of irony is often cited as an important influence on her early work, particularly her poetry.

Short stories

The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) features 11 stories of New York life, several of which have since been widely anthologized, particularly "Goodbye and Good Luck" and "The Used-Boy Raisers." The collection introduces the semi-autobiographical character "Faith Darwin" (in "The Used-Boy Raisers" and "A Subject of Childhood"), who later appears in 6 stories of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and 10 of Later the Same Day. 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.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), a collection of 17 stories, features several recurring characters from Little Disturbances of Man (most notably the narrator "Faith," but also including Johnny Raferty and his mother), while continuing Paley's exploration of racial, gender, and class issues. 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. 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. The collection's shifting narrative voice, metafictive qualities, and fragmented, incomplete plots have led most critics to classify it as a postmodernist work.

Paley continued the stories of Faith and her neighbors in Later the Same Day (1985). All 3 volumes were gathered in her 1994 Collected Stories. , which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Recognition

In 1980, Paley was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1989, Governor Mario Cuomo made her the inaugural official New York State Writer. She was the Vermont State Poet Laureate from March 5, 2003 until July 25, 2007.

Paley's other honors include a 1961 Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, the Edith Wharton Award (1983), the Rea Award for the Short Story (1993), the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1993), and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts (1994).

Her 1994 volume of Collected Stories was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

In popular culture

In 1988, American composer Christian Wolff set 8 poems from Leaning Forward (1985) for soprano, bass-baritone, clarinet/bass-clarinet, and cello.

Her story "Goodbye and Good Luck" was adapted as a musical by Mabel Thomas (book), Muriel Robinson (lyrics) and David Friedman (music) in 1989.

A documentary film entitled "Grace Paley: Collected Shorts" (2009),directed by Lily Rivlin, was presented at the Woodstock International Film Festival and other festivals in 2010. The film contains interviews with Paley and friends, footage of her political activities, and readings from her fiction and poetry.

Publications

Poetry

• Leaning Forward. Penobscot, ME: Granite Press, 1985.
• Long Walks and Intimate Talks (stories and poems, paintings by Vera Williams). New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1991.
• New and Collected Poems. Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House, 1992.
• Begin Again: Collected poems. New York: Farrar Straus, 2000.
• Fidelity. New York: Farrar Straus, 2008. posthumous

Short fiction

• The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of women and men at love . New York: Doubleday, 1959
  • (with introduction by A.S. Byatt). London: Virago, 1980.
• "A Subject of Childhood" and a conversation with the author in New sounds in American fiction (edited by Gordon Lish). 1969
• Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. New York: Farrar Straus, 1974.
• Later the Same Day. New York: Farrar Straus, 1985.
• The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1994.

Non-fiction

• 365 Reasons Not to Have Another War (with Vera Williams). War Resisters League 1989 Peace Calendar 1989.
• Conversations with Grace Paley (edited by Gerhard Bach & Blaine H. Hall). Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
• Just As I Thought (semiautobiographical collection of articles, reports, & talks). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1998.
• In the South Bronx: Photographs (With Mel Rosenthal). Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1998.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

Assorted Poems about her Father - Grace Paley

'That Country' by Grace Paley (You Come Too Poetry Series)

• List of U.S. poets

References

• Judith Arcana Arcana, Judith. "Going to School with Grace Paley," TRIPLOPIA April 15, 2006 [triplopia.com]
• Judith Arcana Arcana, Judith. Grace Paley's Life Stories, A Literary Biography. University of Illinois Press:1993/1994.
• Philip Graham Graham, Philip. "Sip by Sip," The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. University of Chicago Press, 2009. 137-140.
• "Grace Paley," Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003.
• 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. 225-231.
• Hopson, Jacqueline. Voices in Grace Paley's Short Stories. (Master's thesis) University of Exeter, School of English, 1990.

External links

Poems

• "The Poet's Occasional Alternative"
• Grace Paley 1922-2007 at the Poetry Foundation

Audio / video

• Grace Paley at YouTube

Books

• Grace Paley at Amazon.com

About

• Grace Paley profile at the Academy of American Poets
• Grace Paley 1922-2007 at the Jewish Women's Archive
• Grace Paley at FSG
• Every Action was Essential" - interview with the War Resisters League, 2000
• Interview with Poets & Writers Magazine, 2006
• The Miniaturist Art of Grace Paley by Joyce Carol Oates
• "Grace Paley: Faith in diversity" at ProQuest"