Volume 49, Issue 4

GRACE PALEY was a mother and an activist, a poet and an essayist, a humble genius of the short story. A grandmother, a wife, friend to many. She married motion picture cameraman Jess Paley in 1942; they had two children, Nora and Danny. Following a divorce decades later, she married writer and landscape architect Robert Nichols. She was late, it seems likely, with her library books. She told the truth, and she liked a good stick of gum. Her two useful ears—one for literature, one for home—drew us over terrain untracked by the short story until then. Wild kitcheny terrain. Nosey, noisy neighborhoods. Into bedrooms and stoops and subway trains, Paley drew us, up trees in city parks, always listening. She let us listen in.

Her city was New York—in her life and in her work—although she made her home in later years in Thetford, Vermont. Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside in the Bronx in 1922, into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. She attended Hunter College (at the age of fifteen) and, later, New York University; she studied with W. H. Auden at the New School. She taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, City College. "Grace Paley is to New York what William Faulkner is to Mississippi," Vivian Gornick wrote in the Village Voice. Governor Mario Cuomo declared her the first New York State Writer.

Grace Paley s city was New York, but her concern was for the wide messy world. Her teaching took her away from the city—to Syracuse University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the University of Massachusetts, among other places. Her commitment to political action took her even farther afield—to Hanoi on a peace mission, to the 1974 World Peace Conference, to Nicaragua and El Salvador in 1985 in opposition to U.S. policies in those countries. She was a member of the War Resisters League. As one of the "White House Eleven," Paley was arrested in December of 1978 for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn. For forty years, she put her shoulder to the wheel on behalf of peace and feminist movements, describing herself as a "combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."

Paley's stories and essays and poems—in their toughness, their tenderness and humor—set down indelibly the idealism of the pacifist and the anar chist in her. What she knew about writing and craft, Paley said, she learned from writing poems. She "went to school on poetry" although she is likely best known for her three collections of short fiction: The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day. Paley's Collected Stories, dedicated to Sybil Claiborne, her "colleague in the Writing and Mother Trade," was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1994, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her work was recognized in 1961 with a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1970 with the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for the Short Story. She was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980, and received a Rea Award for the Short Story in 1993. Paley s stories are revolutionary and lasting. In the Women's Review of Books,Vivian Gornick says,"People love life more because of her writing."

Grace Paley lived her decades courageously, inviting us to become better people. She died in Vermont on August 22, 2007.

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