Grace Paley was a short story writer of Russian-American descent. Writing at the beginning of the 20th century, her work drew vivid portraits of the life around her neighborhood in the Bronx area of New York. Though her short story collections only numbered three, she is remembered as one of the greatest short story writers of American literature. Writing in America magazine, William Novak referred to Paley as \u201ca writer\u2019s writer<\/a>\u201d who \u201cfocuses her talent and energy on the craft itself.\u201d<\/p>\n What is more remarkable about Paley is that she spent much of her writing years focusing on her two children to her first husband and her work as an activist.<\/p>\n As The Poetry Foundation is keen to point out, writing had only occasionally been Paley\u2019s main occupation. She had spent a lot of time in playgrounds with her children and around other mothers. This mothering time fed into her stories, which are rich in the nuances of dialogue and thematic references to mothers, errant husbands and the ordinary lives of working-class New Yorkers.<\/p>\n Paley was also very active in both the feminist and peace movements. She travelled overseas as part of the anti-Vietnam protests<\/a>. Nonetheless, she chose not to write about this work, other than in political pamphlets. She said:<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI think I could have done more for peace, if I\u2019d written about the war, but I happen to love being in the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n Writing about Paley in the New Yorker,<\/a> Alexandra Schwartz referred to Paley as:<\/p>\n \u201cFirst and foremost an antinuclear, antiwar, antiracist feminist activist who managed, in her spare time, to become one of the truly original voices of American fiction in the later twentieth century.\u201d<\/p>\n Born Grace Goodside in 1922 to Russian-American immigrants, who had arrived in New York at the beginning of the 20th century. She was raised in the Bronx, an experience that would go on to heavily influence her writing. The young Grace\u2019s parents spoke Russian and Yiddish at home. Like many children in her neighborhood, she grew up sandwiched between the two cultures.<\/p>\n Paley\u2019s beginnings were humble, as was her education. She dropped out of high school at 16. Then she attended Hunter College<\/a> for only a year before marriage. Her first husband was a film cameraman named Jesse Paley<\/a>. Married at the age of nineteen in 1942, Grace and Jess had two children together, Nora<\/a> and Danny<\/a>. The couple later divorced.<\/p>\n Between 1942 and 1944, Jess served in the U.S. Army. This line of work meant that Grace lived in the army camps alongside many other wives of servicemen. It was during this time that she first became conscious of the ordinary lives of women and that they were of great importance. She also saw that they had been largely ignored in formal literature.<\/p>\n Paley began writing poetry, continuing after the end of the war when her two children were born. It was soon to short stories that she turned her attention. A key theme throughout Paley\u2019s writing were the young mothers around her and their relationships with one another. She also wrote about their relationships with the men in their lives.<\/p>\n Paley\u2019s first collection appeared in 1959 under the title, \u201cThe Little Disturbances of Man.\u201d She claimed that the stories for this first collection were a result of “two small lucks<\/a>.” The first being an illness she suffered that meant she couldn\u2019t care for her children full-time. This holiday from mothering resulted in more time to write. The second stroke of luck was that an editor at Doubleday<\/a> publishing house, who was an ex-husband of a friend, read three of her stories. He subsequently commissioned her to write some more.<\/p>\n Though it received critical acclaim, the initial sales were modest. She did, however, gain fans of her writing style, which was seen as \u2018fresh and vigorous\u2019 by The New Yorker. Some of Paley\u2019s stories in the collection could be a little morose, but her voice portrays a lively and sometimes dark sense of humor in which to convey the everyday occurrences of city life. The collection opens with the story, \u201cAn Interest in Life,\u201d which sees a woman who has been deserted by her husband and left to bring up her four children alone:<\/p>\n \u201cMy husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn\u2019t right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.\u201d<\/p>\n Paley\u2019s stories hum with the dialects of her mid-20th century life in the Bronx. Her writing style is not plot-heavy but focused on character. She wrote with a fine ear for the Jewish, Black, Irish and Russian dialects that made up the rich tapestry of her neighborhood. The stories \u2014 some of which are more like fragments or vignettes<\/a> \u2014 often lack an established structure. This style led to Paley\u2019s work being considered Postmodern.<\/a><\/p>\n Paley also introduced a recurring character who went on to feature in her later stories. Faith Darwin starts out as a young mother raising her sons in New York. Throughout Paley\u2019s story collections, we see Faith being let down in love and befriending the other young mothers in her neighborhood. Later Faith comes full circle as we see her as a middle-aged woman with grown sons. Paley portrays this journey best through her story, \u201cThe Long-Distance Runner<\/a>.\u201d We see a confused Faith running back through the streets of her life, trying to figure out her identity.<\/p>\n \u201cOne day, before or after forty-two, I became a long-distance runner.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Long-Distance Runner\u201d has been compared to Alan Sillitoe\u2019s<\/a> 1959 story, \u201cThe Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner<\/a>.\u201d Both stories show the central protagonist trying to outrun their lives by taking up running as both an emotional and physical escape.<\/p>\n Many critics focused on Paley\u2019s character of Faith, suggesting that she was an alter ego for Paley herself. Paley herself always denied this theory.<\/p>\n Following the relative success and reception of her first collection, Paley\u2019s publishers encouraged her to write a novel. She gave this project a serious attempt, spending the next two years working on it. However, she gave it up, deciding instead to focus her writing time and energy on more short fiction.<\/p>\n Paley\u2019s second collection eventually appeared in 1974, \u201cEnormous Changes at the Last Minute.\u201d In the interim, she had been heavily involved in both her mothering life and political activities.<\/p>\n Distributing antiwar pamphlets and marching on the Capitol, she had also travelled overseas to protest American involvement in Vietnam.<\/p>\n Her final standalone collection, \u201cLater the Same Day,\u201d appeared in 1985. A later full collection of all of Paley\u2019s stories appeared in 1994. She also wrote a little poetry, publishing several collections. These poems tend more toward political themes, and have not been so critically well-received. Paley herself discredited her poetry as \u201ctoo literary\u201d for some.<\/p>\n She spent a brief time teaching at several New York universities, including Columbia, Syracuse and City College of New York, where she was writer-in-residence.<\/a> She then for 22 years taught at Sarah Lawrence\u2019s Bronx campus<\/a>. Though Jess and Grace Paley separated in the 1950s, they remained married until 1972, when Grace remarried. Her second husband, Robert Nichols<\/a>, was an architect, poet and short story writer. He was also a fellow anti-Vietnam War activist.<\/p>\n Despite her success as a short story writer, Paley continued to travel to countries such as Russia, El Salvador and Nicaragua to protest and assist in various campaigns. She was often arrested for civil disobedience. Even in her old age, she was considered dangerous, unstable and suspected as a communist by the FBI. They continued to hold a file open on her for over 30 years. In reality her family were mostly anti-communist socialists<\/a>.<\/p>\n At just five feet tall and with her wild, white hair, Paley continued to fight for others until her death in 2007 at the age of eighty-four.<\/p>\n<\/div> Ten stories fill the pages of this first collection, which focuses on the inhabitants of a busy New York neighborhood. The characters are the ordinary inhabitants on the street, dealing with the everyday \u201clittle disturbances\u201d of life.<\/p>\n Though displaying Paley\u2019s distinctively fresh and innovative voice, these first stories were more conventionally crafted than some of her later fiction.<\/p>\n Whilst LitHub describes Paley\u2019s style within this first collection as both highly comic and deeply tragic, usually at the same time,<\/a> some readers find the nonlinear or \u201cslapdash\u201d style difficult to follow at times.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> Reviews<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> Amazon<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div> StoryGraph<\/a><\/u><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div> Goodreads<\/a><\/u><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> In Paley\u2019s second collection, 11 of the 17 stories feature women without husbands. The emphasis is again on character over plot, perhaps even more so than her more conventionally crafted first collection.<\/p>\n Critic Lis Harris, in The New Yorker, wrote:<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t think of another writer who captures the itch of the city, or the complexities of love between parents and children, or the cutting edge of sexual combat as well as Grace Paley does.\u201d Some readers on Storygraph<\/a> however found the stories a little difficult to follow.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> Reviews<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> Amazon<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>The Life and Work of Grace Paley<\/h2>\n
Books by Grace Paley<\/h2>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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