Grace Paley

Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007), 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. Her stories home in on the everyday conflicts and heartbreaks of city life, heavily informed by her childhood in the Bronx.

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." They had immigrated 16 or 17 years earlier (in 1906, by one account 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. After dropping out of high school at sixteen, ), then married a film cameraman, Jess Paley, when she was 19, Writing to introduce an interview in The Paris Review, Jonathan Dee, Barbara Jones, and Larissa MacFarquhar note thatWriting 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...

Early in her writing career, Paley experienced a number of rejections for her submitted works. 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.

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.

In Later the Same Day (1985), also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

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. 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." Her sharp dialogue is marked by the rhythms of Yiddish, and her stories tend to reflect the "shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit." and New and Collected Poems (1992). In 1991 she published Long Walks and Intimate Talks, which combined poems and prose writing, and in 2001 she released the collection Begin Again: Collected Poems, which assembled work from throughout her life.

Paley published an essay collection, Just As I Thought, in 1999. 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.

Academic career Paley began to teach writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1966 (through to 1989) and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in the late 1960s. She subsequently served on the faculty at City College and taught courses at Columbia University. and served as vice president of the PEN American Center, She also worked with the American Friends Service Committee to establish neighborhood peace groups, helping found the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961.

With the escalation of the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League. She was arrested on a number of occasions, including spending a week in the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village. 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 1973 World Peace Conference in Moscow 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. In the 1980s Paley supported efforts to improve human rights and resist U.S. military intervention in Central America, and she continued to speak out in her final years against the Iraq War. The couple published a joint book expressing their shared activism through poetry and prose, Here and Somewhere Else, in 2007.

Paley was a decades-long resident of West 11th Street in New York's Greenwich Village, where she raised her children, Nora and Danny. and the Edith Wharton Award Certification of Merit (1986). She won an O'Henry Award in 1969 for her story "Distance." She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980.

Paley went on to receive the Rea Award for the Short Story (1993), the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1993), PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction (1994) and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award (1994). Paley received an honorary degree from Dartmouth University in 1998.

She was named the first official New York State Author in 1986, In 2004, as a part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, Paley received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature. At Dartmouth College's annual Social Justice Awards ceremony in 2006, Paley received the Lester B. Granger '18 Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Homages and adaptations The three-part drama film Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, based on Paley's collection of the same name, was released in 1983.

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

A documentary film titled Grace Paley: Collected Shorts (2009), directed by Lilly 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. ———————