Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007), née Goodside, was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.
Paley wrote three critically acclaimed collections of short stories, which were compiled in the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Collected Stories in 1994. Her stories home in on the everyday conflicts and heartbreaks of city life, heavily informed by her childhood in the Bronx. Paley’s writing is widely recognized for its distinctive authorial voice.
Beyond her work as an author and university professor, Paley was a feminist and anti-war activist, describing herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."
Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx, to Jewish parents, Isaac Goodside and Manya Goodside (née Ridnyik), who were originally from Ukraine, and espoused socialism, especially her mother. They had immigrated 16 or 17 years earlier (in 1906, by one account), following a period under the rule of Ukraine by Czar Nicholas II that saw their exile, her mother to Germany and her father to Siberia—with the change of name from Gutseit as they began their new life in New York.
The family spoke Russian and Yiddish in the home, and eventually English (which her father learned "by reading Dickens"). Isaac trained and became a doctor in New York, and the couple had two children early, and a third, Grace, as they approached middle age. Fourteen years younger than her sister, Jeanne, and 16 years younger than her brother, Victor, Grace was described as being a tomboy as a child. As a child she was tuned in to the intellectual debates of the adults around her, and she was a member of the Falcons, a socialist youth group.
After dropping out of high school at age sixteen, Grace Goodside attended Hunter College for a year, in 1938 and 1939. She studied briefly with W. H. Auden, at the New School, when she was 17, hoping to be a poet. She did not receive a degree from either institution.
Goodside married a film cameraman, Jess Paley, when she was 19, on June 20, 1942. The Paleys had two children, Nora (born 1949) and Danny (born 1951), but later divorced. Introducing an interview with Paley in The Paris Review, Jonathan Dee, Barbara Jones, and Larissa MacFarquhar write:Writing has only occasionally been Paley's main occupation. She spent a lot of time in playgrounds when her children were young. She has always been very active in the feminist and peace movements.
Early in her writing career, Paley experienced a number of rejections for her submitted works. She published her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) with Doubleday. The collection features eleven stories of New York life, several of which have since been widely anthologized, particularly "Goodbye and Good Luck" and "The Used-Boy Raisers," and introduces the semi-autobiographical character "Faith Darwin" (in "The Used-Boy Raisers" and "A Subject of Childhood")—who later appears in six stories of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and nine of Later the Same Day. Though as a story collection by an unknown author the book was not widely reviewed, those who did review it, including Philip Roth and The New Yorker book page, tended to rate the stories highly. Despite an initial lack of publicity, Little Disturbances developed a sufficient following for it to be reissued by Viking Press in 1968.
Following the success of Little Disturbances, Paley's publisher encouraged her to write a novel, but she gave up on the attempt after tinkering with drafts for two years. She instead continued to focus on short stories.
With the encouragement of her friend and neighbor Donald Barthelme, Paley assembled a second collection of fiction in 1974, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This collection of seventeen stories features several recurring characters from Little Disturbances (most notably the narrator "Faith," but also including John Raftery and his mother), while continuing Paley's exploration of racial, gender, and class issues. The long story "Faith in a Tree," positioned roughly at the center of the collection, brings a number of characters and themes from the stories together on a Saturday afternoon at the park; in it, Faith, the narrator, climbs a tree to get a broader perspective on both her neighbors and the "man-wide world" and, after encountering several war protesters, declares a new social and political commitment. The collection's shifting narrative voice, metafictive qualities and fragmented, incomplete plots have led some critics to classify it as a postmodernist work.
In Later the Same Day (1985), also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Paley continues the stories of Faith and her neighbors—but somewhat expanded, with the addition of more black and lesbian voices.
Paley's stories were regathered in a volume from Farrar, Straus in 1994, The Collected Stories, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Her work has been characterized as dealing with the day-to-day triumphs and tragedies of "women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers." As one editor who worked with Paley wrote, "Her characters are people who smell of onions, yell at each other, mourn in darkened kitchens." She wrote what she knew: "I couldn't help the fact that I had not gone to war, and I had not done the male things. I had lived a woman's life and that's what I wrote about."Her sharp dialogue is marked by the rhythms of Yiddish, and her stories tend to reflect the "shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit."
Although more widely known for her short fiction, Paley also published several volumes of poetry including Leaning Forward (1985) and New and Collected Poems (1992). In 1991 she published Long Walks and Intimate Talks, which combined poems and prose writing, and in 2001 she released the collection Begin Again: Collected Poems, which assembled work from throughout her life.
Paley published an essay collection, Just As I Thought, in 1999. She also contributed the piece "Why Peace Is (More Than Ever) a Feminist Issue" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.
Her final book, the poetry collection Fidelity, was published posthumously in 2008.
Paley began to teach writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1966 (through to 1989) and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in the late 1960s. She subsequently served on the faculty at City College and taught courses at Columbia University. She also taught at Syracuse University and served as vice president of the PEN American Center, an organization she'd worked to diversify in the 1980s. Paley summarized her view of teaching during a symposium on "Educating the Imagination," sponsored by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1996:"Our idea was that children—by writing, by putting down words, by reading, by beginning to love literature, by the inventiveness of listening to one another—could begin to understand the world better and begin to make a better world for themselves. That always seemed to me such a natural idea that I've never understood why it took so much aggressiveness and so much time to get it started."
Paley was known for pacifism and for political activism. Her fellow feminist activist Robin Morgan described Paley's activism as broadly focused on social justice: "civil-rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear, feminist, whatever needed revolution." The FBI declared her a communist and kept a file on her for thirty years.