Grace Paley facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Grace Paley
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| Born | Grace Goodside December 11, 1922 The Bronx, New York City |
| Died | August 22, 2007 (aged 84) Thetford, Vermont |
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| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Hunter College (no degree) The New School (no degree) |
| Notable works | "Goodbye and Good Luck" "The Used-Boy Raisers" |
| Notable awards | member, American Academy of Arts and Letters |
| Spouse | Jess Paley Robert Nichols |
| Children | Nora Paley Danny Paley |
Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American writer, poet, teacher, and political activist. She was famous for her short stories.
Paley wrote three popular collections of short stories. These were all put together in a book called The Collected Stories in 1994. This book was even a finalist for important awards like the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories often showed the everyday problems and feelings of people living in the city. Many of her stories were inspired by her own childhood in the Bronx.
Besides being a writer and a university teacher, Grace Paley was also a feminist and an anti-war activist. This means she believed in equal rights for women and worked for peace. She once called herself a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist." This meant she was a strong supporter of peace and freedom.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx, a part of New York City. Her parents, Isaac and Manya, were Jewish and came from Ukraine. They were also socialists, which means they believed in fairness and equality for everyone in society. They moved to New York around 1906.
At home, her family spoke Russian and Yiddish, which is a language often spoken by Jewish people. Later, they learned English. Her father became a doctor in New York. Grace was the youngest of three children, much younger than her brother and sister. She was known as a tomboy when she was little. She also joined a socialist youth group called the Falcons.
Grace left high school when she was sixteen. She went to Hunter College for a year but didn't finish her degree. At 19, in 1942, she married Jess Paley, who worked with films. They had two children, Nora and Danny, but later divorced. Grace also studied briefly with a famous poet, W. H. Auden, at The New School. She hoped to become a poet, but she never got a degree from any college.
Writing Journey
When Grace Paley first started writing, her stories were often turned down. But she kept going! Her first book of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, came out in 1959. This book had eleven stories about life in New York. Some of these stories, like "Goodbye and Good Luck," became very popular. In some stories, she created a character named "Faith Darwin," who was a bit like herself.
Even though her first book wasn't widely reviewed at first, it gained many fans. Because of this, it was re-released in 1968. After her first book did well, her publisher wanted her to write a novel (a longer story). But Grace Paley decided to stick with short stories instead.
In 1974, she released her second collection of stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. This book had seventeen stories and continued to explore ideas about race, gender (being male or female), and social class. One long story, "Faith in a Tree," shows many characters and ideas coming together in a park. In this story, Faith climbs a tree to see things from a different view and decides to get more involved in social and political issues.
Her next book, Later the Same Day, came out in 1985. It continued the stories of Faith and her neighbors, adding more voices from different backgrounds.
In 1994, all of Paley's stories were collected into one book called The Collected Stories. This book was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, which are very important literary awards.
Grace Paley's stories are known for showing the daily joys and sadness of women, especially Jewish women from New York. Her writing often sounds like real conversations, with the rhythms of Yiddish language.
Even though she was best known for her short stories, Paley also published several books of poetry. These include Leaning Forward (1985) and New and Collected Poems (1992). She also wrote an essay collection called Just As I Thought in 1999. Her last book, a poetry collection called Fidelity, was published after she passed away in 2008.
Teaching Career
Grace Paley started teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1966. She also helped start the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York. Later, she taught at City College and Columbia University. She also taught at Syracuse University. She was also a vice president for the PEN American Center, an organization that supports writers.
Political Activism
Grace Paley was very well known for her pacifism (belief in peace) and for being a political activist. This means she actively worked to bring about social and political change. Her friend, Robin Morgan, said that Paley worked for many important causes. These included civil rights (equal rights for all people), the anti-war movement, and feminism. The FBI even kept a file on her for thirty years because of her activism.
Starting in the 1950s, Paley joined friends in protesting against nuclear proliferation (the spread of nuclear weapons) and American militarization (building up military power). She also helped create peace groups in neighborhoods. She even met her second husband, Robert Nichols, through the movement against the Vietnam War.
As the Vietnam War grew, Paley joined the War Resisters League. She was arrested several times for her protests. In 1968, she signed a pledge to refuse to pay taxes to protest the Vietnam War. In 1969, she became more widely known when she went on a peace trip to Hanoi to help free prisoners of war. She also attended a World Peace Conference in Moscow in 1973.
In 1978, she was arrested again as one of "The White House Eleven." This happened when she and others held up an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn. The banner said, "No Nuclear Weapons—No Nuclear Power—USA and USSR." In the 1980s, Paley supported efforts to improve human rights and stop U.S. military actions in Central America. She continued to speak out against the Iraq War in her later years.
Personal Life and Final Years
Grace Paley's Jewish background was a very important part of who she was and what she wrote about. Even though she was raised without a strong religious belief, she found a community in her local synagogue in Vermont later in life. She believed more in the idea of the Jewish diaspora (Jewish people living all over the world) than in a Jewish nation. She said, "I was never a Zionist," meaning she didn't support the idea of a Jewish state in Israel.
Paley's first marriage to Jess Paley ended in divorce in 1972, but they remained good friends. Later that year, she married Robert Nichols, who was also a poet and anti-war activist. They even published a book together in 2007, called Here and Somewhere Else, which showed their shared activism through poems and stories.
For many years, Grace Paley lived in Greenwich Village in New York City, where she raised her children, Nora and Danny. She didn't learn to drive until she was 55 years old! In the 1970s, she started spending summers in Thetford, Vermont, with Robert Nichols. They eventually moved there permanently in the early 1990s.
Grace Paley passed away at the age of 84. She had been getting treatment for breast cancer. She left behind her husband, her two children, and three grandchildren. In an interview just a few months before she died, Paley talked about her hopes for her grandchildren. She wished for "a world without militarism and racism and greed—and where women don't have to fight for their place in the world."
Awards and Recognition
Grace Paley received many honors during her life. These include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction in 1961 and the Edith Wharton Award in 1986. She won an O'Henry Award in 1969 for her story "Distance." In 1980, she was chosen to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She also received the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1993 and the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in the same year. In 1994, she won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award. Dartmouth University gave her an honorary degree in 1998.
In 1986, she was named the first official New York State Author. She was also named the poet laureate of Vermont in 2003.
In 2003, she received the Robert Creeley Award. In 2004, she got the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature. In 2006, Dartmouth College gave her the Lester B. Granger '18 Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Today, there is a special literary award named after her, called the Grace Paley Prize. It is given by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
Books and Films Inspired by Her Work
A three-part drama film called Enormous Changes at the Last Minute was released in 1983. It was based on Grace Paley's story collection of the same name.
In 1988, a composer named Christian Wolff created music for eight of her poems. Her story "Goodbye and Good Luck" was even turned into a musical in 1994.
A documentary film about her life, called Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, came out in 2009. It showed interviews with Paley and her friends, clips of her political activities, and readings from her stories and poems.
