Paley, Grace Goodrich

With a worldwide reputation larger than her relatively modest output, Grace Paley, poet, short fiction writer, and social activist was a significant feminist figure of the postmodern 20th century and Jewish literature. At a time when familial writings were considered trivial, she was among those early pioneers who wrote about the personal and political lives of women and children, especially focusing on the fatigue, sexuality, and exasperation of single mothers of all lifestyles.

Paley was born in the Bronx as Grace Goodside, the youngest child of immigrant Ukrainian Jewish antireligious socialists who were exiled by Czar Nicholas II to various prisons. She grew up in a feisty, intellectual household with two older teenage siblings, aunts, a grandmother, and any needy relative arriving from distant shores. Her father taught himself English and became a doctor. Russian, Yiddish, and heavily accented English mixed with other ethnic dialects in their immigrant neighborhood. It was this idiom that eventually dominated Paley's short stories and poetry. Entering Hunter College at 16 and dropping out to study briefly at New York University, she finally enrolled at the New School for Social Research to study with W.H. Auden; she ardently imitated his style until he suggested she find her own voice.

At 19, she married Jess Paley, a freelance cinematographer who chose itinerant work. Paley had two children, Nora (1949-) and Danny (1951-), and for the next 21 years worked at secretarial jobs. During this time, she was constantly steeped in her family, neighborhood, paying jobs, and political causes, but all the while was writing poetry.

While she was recovering from a lost pregnancy in 1952, Jess urged her to begin writing short stories; in these, she included the diverse life of her Greenwich Village neighborhood. A friend handed the stories about women and children in Washington Square Park to her ex-husband, an influential editor at Doubleday, who asked for more. In 1959, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love introduced the lusty and gregarious character of Faith Darwin Asbury, a single mother with two sons, Paley's alter ego who reflected the same familiar and political worries.

Paley's unique, realistic, and sparse conversational tone, eschewing sentimentality as well as punctuation marks, was full of internal and sometimes comic monologues that resonated with the public and finally generated some reliable income—as well as recognition and work as a teacher at Sarah Lawrence. Featuring urban, blue-collar lives, she became known as a master storyteller who put wispy and hard wisdom into colloquial dialogue. This publication led to the 1961 Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction.