Short Fiction:
The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women in Love, 1959
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974
Later the Same Day, 1985
The Collected Stories, 1994
Poetry:
Leaning Forward, 1985
New and Collected Poems, 1992
Begin Again: Collected Poems, 2000
Nonfiction:
Conversations with Grace Paley, 1997 (Gerhard Bach and Blaine H. Hall, editors)
Just as I Thought, 1998
Miscellaneous:
Long Walks and Intimate Talks: Stories and Poems, 1991 (with paintings by Vera Williams)
Grace Paley (PAY-lee) is among the preeminent American writers of short fiction. She was born in New York City on December 11, 1922, the daughter of Russian immigrants Isaac Goodside (a physician) and Manya Ridnyik. With a mix of English, Russian, and Yiddish dominating her domestic conversation and the streets of the Bronx serving as her childhood playground, it is no surprise that Paley’s fiction is rich with ethnic accents and is urban to the core. She herself has said that “in the end, the greatest influence you have is the language of your childhood and the social life of that world.” Although her verbal gifts were evident when she was still a child and were encouraged by older siblings and other family members, Paley did not begin writing stories until she was in her thirties. Paley attended Hunter College (1938-1939) and in 1942 married Jess Paley, a cinematographer, with whom she had two children, Nora and Dan. They soon separated but did not divorce for twenty years. In 1972, writer and activist Robert Nichols became her second husband. In addition to writing, Paley taught at Columbia University, Syracuse University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and she became an impassioned advocate for women’s rights, pacifism, and other social and political causes.
Grace Paley
The publication of her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, was the result of a family friend and Doubleday editor having read three stories and promising a book contract if she would produce another seven pieces. Paley was soon heralded as a distinctive and scrupulous stylist, whose characters endure urban vicissitudes bravely, with dignity and self-deprecating humor. Among the most distinguished (and distinguishable) features of the author’s fiction is her quirky, inventive approach to one of the more difficult of literary subjects: the ordinary. One indicator of the remarkably rapid development of Paley’s audience is the unusual publishing history of this first volume, which was reprinted in several paperback editions and then reissued in hardcover by yet another publisher.
Fifteen years after her auspicious entry into the literary scene, Paley’s second collection of stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, appeared in 1974. On the whole, these seventeen stories are formally less traditional, more transparently personal and political, than those in the first volume. In “A Conversation with My Father,” one of the collection’s most successful and conspicuously autobiographical stories, the author self-consciously dramatizes an aesthetic debate between the writer-narrator, who is partial to elliptical, nonlinear narrative, and her father, who appeals for traditionally plotted, resolved fiction. Although the tales are frequently short on plot and conventional development, open-ended, and semantically indeterminate, the inclusive ethnicity of the characters, the unerring authenticity of their voices, and the frequent linguistic surprises combine to give the volume Paley’s imprint.
In 1985, Later the Same Day, Paley’s third volume, was published. Its unity and effectiveness have much to do with the stories involving Faith, the feisty narrator, who had appeared in the two previous collections and who presides over more than half of this volume’s seventeen tales. An indomitable, now middle-aged woman, Faith shows a capacity to worry about her family–elderly parents and her two grown sons, Richard and Tonto–that seems as inexhaustible as her passion for life’s challenges and pleasures. Paley’s standard thematic preoccupations and distinctive voice virtually assured an audience for Leaning Forward, her first book of poetry. Strewn across the idiosyncratic New York City landscape is the usual miscellany of ethnic (especially Jewish) figures steeped in familial or political imbroglios. Moreover, the seemingly artless, offhand observations long associated with her fiction lose none of their luster or effect in the new genre.
Paley is widely recognized as a “writer’s writer,” a master stylist of fiction. A few critics, however, found her work uneven, particularly in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Later the Same Day. For the most part, the problem seems to lie with Paley’s very short pieces, often dismissed as “arch” or “cute,” a circumstance made worse by their being interposed between the more substantive longer stories. Another recurring charge has been that the characteristic jokes in her tales are evasions rather than responses to life’s indignities. One reply to this criticism is to remind such critics that two of Paley’s undisputed strengths are her abiding hope and her comic imagination and that, occasionally, jokes have been among the most poignant human acknowledgments of tragedy.
In 1980, Grace Paley was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961; a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1970; the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1986; and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987. The Collected Stories, published in 1994, was nominated for a National Book Award and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Paley was honored with the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Fiction in 1997. Paley died from breast cancer at her home in Vermont on August 22, 2007.