Elizabeth Cullinan

Elizabeth Irene Cullinan (7 June 1933 – 26 January 2020) was an Irish–American writer who started her career as a typist at The New Yorker magazine, which published her stories from 1960 to 1981. She produced two short story collections, The Time of Adam and Yellow Roses (1977), and two novels, House of Gold (1970) and A Change of Scene (1982). Cullinan was not well-known but her modest output earned her "outsize acclaim" from her contemporaries, including Joyce Carol Oates, and comparisons to Chekhov and Joyce. Her work centred primarily on working class Irish-Americans, Catholicism and "women keen to avoid the lives their mothers had". She won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Carnegie Fund. She graduated from there in 1954. Due to her father's financial difficulties, the family had to move in with her maternal grandmother.

She lived in Dublin, Ireland from 1961 to 1963 and her time there inspired her novel House of Gold (1970), which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. Her short story The Swim tells of a day trip to the beach with an Irish writer, likely John McGahern with whom she had a relationship.

On 9 April 2024, Fordham University hosted a panel discussion of her life and work to mark the re-issue of Yellow Roses. Panelists included novelists Peter Quinn and Mary Gordon, Fordham's Chair of Irish Studies Keri Walsh, and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her fiction explores Catholics grappling with the sexual revolution and the tensions between a still-pious older generation and young people alienated from religion in a secular world.

Several stories explore the changing roles of women in the 1960s. Many of her characters are Manhattan women with careers, who reject domesticity and find work "creative and sustaining". According to Professor Patricia Coughlan of University College Cork, Cullinan "resists assumptions that women’s concerns and experience are supplementary to men’s". She helped redefine Irish-American literature, moving away from the male tradition of "ward bosses and henchmen".

Later life and death Cullinan moved to Towson, Maryland in 2015 to be closer to family. She died from lung disease on 26 January 2020 at a retirement community there, aged 86 and is buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y.

Works Novels House of Gold (1970) A Change of Scene (1982)

Short story collections The Time of Adam (1971) Yellow Roses (1977)

Short stories + Title Publication Collected in "The Ablutions" The New Yorker (6 February 1960) The Time of Adam "The Voices of the Dead" The New Yorker (16 April 1960) Yellow Roses "Le Petit Déjeuner" The New Yorker (13 August 1960) The Time of Adam "The Time of Adam" The New Yorker (10 September 1960) "The Power of Prayer" The New Yorker (7 January 1961) "The Reunion" The New Yorker (18 February 1961) "The Nightingale" The New Yorker (30 December 1961) "A Swim" The New Yorker (5 June 1965) "The Old Priest" The New Yorker (18 December 1965) "A Sunday Like the Others" The New Yorker (26 August 1967) "Sleep" The New Yorker (1 June 1968) - "Maura's Friends"aka "Nora's Friends" The New Yorker (29 August 1970) The Time of Adam "Only Human" The New Yorker (6 February 1971) Yellow Roses "Yellow Roses" The New Yorker (4 March 1972) "In the Summerhouse" The New Yorker (8 July 1972) "The Perfect Crime" The New Yorker (27 August 1973) "An Accident" The New Yorker (27 May 1974) "The Sun and Substance" Shenandoah (Summer 1975) "Life After Death" The New Yorker (26 January 1976) "Estelle" The New Yorker (19 April 1976) "A Story in the Key of C" The New Yorker (7 June 1976) "Idioms" The New Yorker (31 January 1977) - "A Foregone Conclusion" Yellow Roses (April 1977) Yellow Roses "Dreaming" "A Good Loser" The New Yorker (15 August 1977) - "Echoes" The New Yorker (15 June 1981) - "Commuting" Irish Literary Supplement (Spring 1983) - "The Black Diamond" Threshold (Winter 1983/84) - "In Passing" Colorado Review (1995) -