Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie (born September 3, 1926) is an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she has also written numerous non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.

Personal life

Lurie was born in Chicago but grew up in White Plains, New York, the daughter of Bernice (Stewart) and Harry Lawrence Lurie, a Latvian-born professor.[1][2][3] She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947.[4] The next year she married Jonathan Peale Bishop, then a graduate student at Harvard. Bishop was a critic and essayist who, in the 1970s and later, became a writer of autobiographically-inflected books about Catholic Christianity. He taught at Amherst College, in Massachusetts (1957–61), and then at Cornell University (1961–). Lurie moved along with him. Lurie and Bishop have three sons;[4] they divorced in 1985 after a long separation. She is currently married to the writer Edward Hower. She spends part of her time in London, part at Cornell, and part in Key West.

In 1970, Lurie began to teach in the English Department at Cornell, where she was tenured in 1979. She taught Children’s Literature (a new field in the 1970s) and writing. In 1989 she was named the F. J. Whiton Professor of American Literature at Cornell. She is now emerita.

Fiction

Lurie’s published novels:

Lurie has also published a book of short stories, Women and Ghosts. This collection of nine (or ten[6]) tales presents kindly or maleficent spirits inhabiting places or objects with which the heroines come into contact. Among the characters who narrate or figure in the stories are Ruth and Celia Zimmern, Gary Mumpson, Janet Belle Smith and assorted Stockwells, and Miranda Fenn. Miranda’s son Charles marries Celia, Leonard Zimmern’s daughter, in the story “In the Shadow.” The daughter of the beatnik (proto-hippie) Tylers of “Nowhere City” has married Clark Stockwell III, Janet’s son, in “Waiting for the Baby.”

Themes and characters

Lurie’s novels, with their light touch and focus on portraying the emotions of well-educated adulterers, bear more resemblance to some 20th-century British authors, (e.g. Kingsley Amis, David Lodge) than to the big American authors of her generation.[7] Her titles and the saga-like intertwining of her characters suggest high ambitions. Love and Friendship, the title of her first published novel, is shared with an early novel by Jane Austen; it takes on the problem of the American college as initiation rite into manhood, and the awkwardness of the role therein assigned to women. The next title, The Nowhere City, evokes both Thomas More’s Utopia (Greek for “nowhere”) and Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, California, “There is no there there.” Utopias are the subject of Imaginary Friends and Real People: the small group of spiritualists examined by a sociologist and the small group of artists examined by a writer. The War between the Tates and Foreign Affairs imply by their titles parallels between academic adulteries and political upheavals. The Truth about Lorin Jones and Truth and Consequences take us back to the problem of truth-telling, both in life and in art.

A number of Lurie's characters are, like her, born in 1926, give or take a few years: Lorin Jones and Mary Ann/Miranda Fenn,[8] Janet Belle Smith (42 in Real People, 1969), Erica Tate (40 in 1969 and like Lurie a Radcliffe B.A.), Vinnie Miner (54 in Foreign Affairs, 1978, and like Lurie a professor of children’s literature), and Wilkie Walker (70 in Last Resort, 1998). Since these characters have also followed Lurie from Amherst/Convers to Los Angeles to Cornell/Corinth and to London and Key West, inevitably one considers the possibility that some at least of these characters represent the author herself. Janet Belle Smith (Real People) and Delia Delaney (Truth and Consequences) are rather pretentious writers of whom Lurie makes fun some of the time, but they also reflect aspects of her experience as a writer.[9]

Adaptations

Children's literature

Lurie has also produced a number of books for children, in collaboration with illustrators such as Monika Beisner and Jessica Souhami. Examples include:

Non-fiction

In 1981 Lurie published The Language of Clothes. This book lays out some principles of communication by means of dress.

Lurie co-edited the Garland Library of Children's Classics (73 vol.). In 1990, she published Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature. A further collection of essays on this theme, Boys and Girls Forever, appeared in 2003. Her essay "The Supernatural Power of Knitting" appears in the anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).

She often reviews literature and children’s culture for the New York Review of Books.

In 2001 Lurie published a memoir, Familiar Spirits, recounting a decades-long friendship with poet James Merrill (1926–1995) and his partner David Jackson (1922–2001). Lurie credits Merrill and Jackson for encouraging her writing in the 1950s, a period during which she suffered many rejections from publishers.

Awards

Notes

  1. ↑
  2. ↑
  3. ↑ http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview15
  4. 1 2 "Biography Profile: Alison Lurie" Marquis Who's Who on the Web
  5. ↑ Lurie, Alison. Women and Ghosts. New York: Doubleday. 1994
  6. ↑ One story, “Something Borrowed, Something Blue,” is not in all editions but is available online. It is a retelling of a story about Medea, set now at Corinth University.
  7. ↑ E.g. “Comedies of Manners, Laced with Morals,” review of ‘’Last Resort’’ by Mel Gussow, New York Times 9/5/1998: “... she has more in common with English authors from Evelyn Waugh to David Lodge than she does with many of her American contemporaries.”.
  8. ↑ Lorin Jones’s birth year is mentioned in Truth about Lorin Jones, p. 43 (Little, Brown hb edition), and she and Mary Ann are the same age.
  9. ↑ Lurie’s relation to Janet is obviously complex; in the biographical note printed in Real People, she dissociates herself explicitly from Janet, saying she herself is an “insensitive lady novelist” as opposed to sensitive Janet. At the same time, Janet’s experiences of Illyria presumably reflect Lurie’s own at Yaddo, and both make the decision to write about this forbidden topic and so be cast out of paradise. Janet toys during the first part of Real People with the idea of writing a series of ghost stories, one of which involves a fat ghost; Lurie’s only volume of short stories is called Women and Ghosts (1995) and this includes one called “Fat People.” Delia in Truth and Consequences, a highly theatrical Southern writer who seems far from Lurie’s character or persona, also writes ghost stories. One feels that Lurie’s ambivalence with regard to her heroines is what makes them so sharp and moving.
  10. ↑ "Retired Cornell professor elected to arts academy" The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York) 5 May 2005 p. 78
  11. ↑ "Retired Cornell English Professor Named New York State Author" The Cornell Daily Sun (Ithaca, New York) 31 Aug 2012

References

External links


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