Writer, teacher, activist

Iconoclastic writer, teacher, and political activist Grace Paley died August 22, 2007. She taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College from 1966 to 1989.

"Grace Paley played a central role in the development of the College's writing program," said Pauline Watts, dean of the College. "She loved to teach writing because she knew that it was a way to introduce young people to the difficult, life-long task of telling the truth."

Watts recalled Paley's assertion, in a 1986 interview that "if you lie, things go wrong. You become sentimental, opaque, bombastic, you withhold information."

"Grace always told the truth—as a writer, as a courageous political activist," Watts said. "And she taught scores of Sarah Lawrence students how to find their own way of telling the truth.

"We will miss her. But she will remain with us as we continue in our own work to honor the deep social and artistic commitments that underlay her life and her art."

Paley wrote three books of short fiction: The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985). In 1994 the books were collected into one volume, Collected Stories, which won the National Book Award.

Paley also wrote five books of poetry: 16 Broadsides (1980), Goldenrod (1982), Leaning Forward: Poems (1985), New and Collected Poems (1992) and Begin Again: Collected Poems (2001). She published two collections of prose: Long Walks and Intimate Talks (1991) and Just as I Thought (1998).

But Paley was best known for her stories. Often described as quirky, lean, and flawless, they were marked by a strong sense of place—specifically, the region between 14^th Street and Houston in Manhattan, where Paley lived for many years—and a keen awareness of the dialect, and the dialogue, particular to that place. In 1985 the Washington Post said, "Her short stories are a kind of New York chamber music in which the instruments are the voices of the city."

Paley's short stories garnered instant praise from the literary community—Susan Sontag and Donald Bartheme were fans—as well as more formal accolades. In 1986 then-Governor Mario Cuomo named Paley New York's first official state writer. She won a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship and the Rea Award for the Short Story, which is the biggest prize of its kind in the United States. In addition, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute was made into a movie starring Kevin Bacon.

"She really leaves her mark on everyone.
Anyone who meets her remembers her."

—Joan Silber '67 on Grace Paley

At Sarah Lawrence College, Paley was a famously popular teacher. Other writing faculty would advise students not to graduate without taking one of her classes, and five times more students would register than could be accommodated. All students were invited to the regular poetry readings that Paley held in her office, just for fun. Paley also taught at Columbia University, Syracuse University, and City College. She said that teaching enhanced her writing by putting her in touch with a younger generation.

"She really leaves her mark on everyone," said Joan Silber '67, a member of the writing faculty who was in Paley's first writing class at Sarah Lawrence, on the occasion of Paley's return to campus for a reading. "Anyone who meets her remembers her."

Paley influenced a generation of student writers, including such prominent ones as Ann Patchett '85 and Allan Gurganus '72, the author of novels including Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and himself a Sarah Lawrence faculty member.

At a 1986 event honoring Paley as the first New York State Author, Gurganus described a moment of revelation while studying with her. "To me, trapped on the tramp steamer of the 19th century's rhetorical constructions, she was able to offer an olive branch in a way so chummy that I cannot quite recall, these 25 years later, her exact words. 'Oh, hon, it's not about that, it's more about how people learn to live in groups or don't, and what they'll give up to get their way and everything they sacrifice by winning.' I knew exactly what she meant; I literally ran from her office and, awash in dependent clauses and authorial drag, I bolted up the stairs to my dorm room and typed out the first true work, in sentences declarative and short yet pushy, about people related by blood but little else." See Gurganus's complete remarks.

When Paley received the Edith Wharton Award in 1986, Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy said that she "often writes about the people in the streets—protestors, radicals, feminists, blacks, Irishmen, Jews, Puerto Ricans—people whom one critic has called 'people of courage.'"

Paley herself noted, "I think I could have done more for peace if I'd written about the war, but I happen to love being in the streets."

Paley was a political activist for her entire adult life, focusing on the peace, women's rights and anti-nuclear proliferation movements. She called herself a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist." She helped found the Greenwich Village Peace Center, which became a nexus of draft resistance during the Vietnam War; she was also a pioneer member of the War Resister's League. She was arrested several times at anti-war protests, and traveled to Hanoi in 1969 as part of a peace delegation.

Her activism did not end after the war. In 1978, she was one of the "White House Eleven," a group of protesters arrested and tried for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn—a case that chagrined free-speech advocates across the country. (She received a fine and a suspended sentence.)

Activism came naturally to Paley. She said, "For a lot of people, politics is being either a Democrat or a Republican. I never felt that way. I saw it as part of my immediate world, part of the life of my community."

Paley credited her social conscience to the influence of her parents, Issac and Mary Goodside, who had agitated against czarist oppression as teenagers in turn-of-the-century Russia. Both were exiled to Siberia for their troubles, but they were released when the czar freed all prisoners under 21 in honor of the birth of his son. Soon afterwards they emigrated to America, settling in the Bronx in 1905. Grace was born in 1922.

Paley attended Hunter College at age 15, and later went to NYU, but she did not graduate from either—though she received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Sarah Lawrence when she spoke at Commencement in 2004. She married Jess Paley, a filmmaker, in 1942, and moved to Greenwich Village, where they had two children. She and her husband divorced, and in 1972 she married Robert Nichols, a writer and landscape architect. She lived in Thetford Hill, Vermont.

Sarah Lawrence College will announce plans to honor Paley during the coming academic year. The College has established an endowed scholarship in Grace Paley's name, and gifts may also be made to the Fund for Sarah Lawrence in Grace Paley's memory. Learn more about making a gift»