Grace Paley


Grace Paley was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.

Biography

Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922 in the Bronx, to Isaac Goodside and the former Manya Ridnyik, Jewish socialists originally from Ukraine, at least her mother, committedly so. They had immigrated 16-17 years before —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.
The family would speak Russian and Yiddish in the home, and eventually English. Isaac would train and become a doctor in New York, and the couple would have two children early, and third, Grace, as they approached middle age. 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.
Grace Goodside attended Hunter College for a year, then married a "film camerman", Jess Paley, when she was 19, on June 20, 1942. The Paleys would have two children, Nora and Danny, but would later divorce. 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...
before going on to describe her teaching affiliations. Paley studied briefly thereafter with W. H. Auden, at the New School, pursuing a hope to be a poet. She did not receive a degree from either institution.
Paley married fellow poet, and author of the Nghsi-Altai series of novels, Robert Nichols, in 1972.
Paley died at the age of 84, after battling breast cancer for some time. At the time of her death, Paley had been living in Thetford, Vermont with her second husband, Robert Nichols. 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."

Academic career

Paley would serve on the faculty at City College, and taught courses thereafter at Columbia University and then at Sarah Lawrence College, ending the latter appointment sometime before 1992. She also taught at Syracuse University.
Paley began to teach writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1966, and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in 1967. 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 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!"

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 second 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 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. Into the 1990s Paley supported efforts to improve human rights and resist U.S. military intervention in Central America.

Writings

Early in her writing career, Paley experienced a number of rejections for her submitted works. Paley published her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man with Doubleday. 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" —who later appears in six stories of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and ten 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. Despite an initial lack of publicity, Little Disturbances developed a sufficient following for it to be reissued by Viking Press in 1968.
Following the success of Little Disturbances, Paley's publisher encouraged her to write a novel.
Goodbye and Good Luck was adapted as a musical by Melba Thomas, Muriel Robinson, and David Friedman in 1989.
After several years of tinkering with drafts, Paley went back to short fiction. With the aid of Donald Barthelme, Paley assembled a second collection of fiction in 1974, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This collection of seventeen stories features several recurring characters from Little Disturbances, 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; 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. The collection's shifting narrative voice, metafictive qualities, and fragmented, incomplete plots have led most critics to classify it as a postmodernist work.
In the Later the Same Day, also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Paley continues the stories of Faith and her neighbors.
Paley's stories were regathered in a volume from Farrar, Straus in 1994, Collected Stories, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Although more widely known for her short fiction, Paley also published three volumes of poetry, Leaning Forward, New and Collected Poems, and Long Walks and Intimate Talks. Paley also contributed the piece, "Why Peace Is a Feminist Issue", to the 2003 anthology , edited by Robin Morgan.

Awards and recognition

Paley's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, and the Edith Wharton Award. In 1988, American composer Christian Wolff set eight poems from Leaning Forward for soprano, bass-baritone, clarinet/bass-clarinet, and cello.
Paley went on to receive the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts. Paley received an honorary degree from Dartmouth University in 1998.
In 2003, she received the Robert Creeley Award. In 2004, as a part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, Paley received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature award, which is given annually in Rockville Maryland, the city where Fitzgerald, his wife, and his daughter are buried. At Dartmouth College's annual Social Justice Awards ceremony in 2006, Paley received the Lester B. Granger '18 Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Paley was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Grace Paley Prize, a literary award, is presented by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in her honour.

Published books

A documentary film entitled Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, 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.