Grace Paley, Renowned Short Story Writer, 84

Grace Paley, 84, an American writer who achieved literary renown as a master of the short story and forged a small but influential body of work that illuminated the frustrations and joys of women’s lives, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford, Vt. She had breast cancer.Paley’s output was relatively small — several dozen short stories as well as a few collections of poetry and essays — but the quality of her work attracted superlatives from the country’s brightest literary figures.Novelist Philip Roth praised her “understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness, and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike.” Writer Susan Sontag called her “a rare kind of writer, a natural with a voice like no one else’s: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute.”Paley was often regarded as a feminist writer because her stories brought rare and early insight into how urban women struggle with emotional and physical vulnerabilities; demanding children and lovers, and absent, often misogynistic husbands.She found the feminist label confining, yet she gave the movement credit for elevating her stature. “Every woman writing in these years has had to swim in the feminist wave,” she wrote. “No matter what she thinks of it, even if she bravely swims against it, she has been supported by it — the buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness.”Her earliest stories were rich in humor and irony. In “The Loudest Voice,” a Jewish child’s vocal stamina makes her the ideal narrator of a school Christmas play. Paley gradually gave way to grimmer themes ranging from rape to mental illness. She also ventured into character studies less driven by plot.She tended to draw more mixed reviews for the later work. Still, an editor for the New York Times Book Review, Robert R. Harris, once noted that Paley’s literary reputation remained largely untarnished because “her best stories have staying power, and a few can justifiably be called brilliant.”Her first collection, “The Little Disturbances of Man” (1959), contained some of her most anthologized works, including “Goodbye and Good Luck,” which contained many of the hallmarks of her prose — the uncluttered sentences, the flawed but sympathetic female narrator, and the pitch-perfect Bronx street vernacular of her youth that American poet laureate Robert Pinsky once called “the lyrically yakking cadence of New York City speech.”Paley wrote her fiction slowly and sparingly, spending a great deal of time focused on her deepening political involvement as a pacifist concerned with environmental and anti-military causes.A New Yorker, she maintained a second home in Vermont, where she protested the war in Iraq in a low-key manner she once described as “vigiling on the common.”Paley could talk wryly of her activism. In her introduction to the “Greenwich Village Peace Center Cookbook,” she warned the reader that “this cookbook is for people who are not so neurotically anti-authoritarian as I am — to whom one can say, ‘Add the juice of one lemon’ without the furious response, ‘Is that a direct order?'”She was the daughter of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants who had been dedicated anti-czarists and punished with exile. The family name was changed from Gutzeit to Goodside upon arrival in New York. Her father, Isaac, became a doctor and a painter.Grace Goodside was born December 11, 1922, in the Bronx. She later recalled the neighborhood as “a world so dense with Jews that I thought we were the great imposing majority.” As a child, she developed a keen ear for the Yiddish, Russian, and broken English spoken around her.In 1942, she married Jess Paley, a movie cameraman. They had two children before divorcing, Nora Paley, of Thetford, and Danny Paley, of Brooklyn, N.Y.Besides those two children, survivors include her second husband, author Robert Nichols, whom she married in 1972, of Thetford; three stepchildren, Duncan Nichols of Thetford, Eliza Nichols of Manhattan, and Kerstin Nichols of Hartford, Vt.; and seven grandchildren.

Grace Paley, Renowned Short Story Writer, 84

Grace Paley, Renowned Short Story Writer, 84

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