Alison Lurie
Encyclopedia
Alison Lurie 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.
but grew up in White Plains, New York
. She graduated from Radcliffe College
in 1947. 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; 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.
Lurie has also published a book of short stories, Women and Ghosts. This collection of nine (or ten) 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.”
, David Lodge
) than to the big American authors of her generation. 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.” Utopia
s 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, 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.
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 2004.
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.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It originated as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, which was awarded between 1918 and 1947.-1910s:...
for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs (novel)
Foreign Affairs is a 1984 novel by Alison Lurie, which concerns itself with American academics in England. The novel won multiple awards, including the 1984 National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1985, and was made into a television movie in 1993.-Plot summary:Unmarried...
. Although better known as a novelist, she has also written numerous non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
of dress.
Personal life
Lurie was born in ChicagoChicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
but grew up in White Plains, New York
White Plains, New York
White Plains is a city and the county seat of Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located in south-central Westchester, about east of the Hudson River and northwest of Long Island Sound...
. She graduated from Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...
in 1947. 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
Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...
, in Massachusetts (1957–61), and then at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
(1961-). Lurie moved along with him. Lurie and Bishop have three sons; 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:- Love and Friendship (1962). Emmy Stockwell Turner and Miranda Fenn, two faculty wives at the all-male elite and isolated Convers College, juggle their love and friendship for their husbands and for a womanizing composer.
- The Nowhere City (1965). Paul Cattleman, history grad student, moves to L.A. to work for the military-industrial complex and finds that neither the company nor his beatnik mistress have a sense of history; he returns to Harvard. His wife however, with the help of a womanizing psychiatrist, frees herself from disabling fears and decides to stay.
- Imaginary Friends (1967). Roger Zimmern, a young sociology professor at an upstate New York university (Corinth), helps a senior professor investigate a group of small-town individuals who are receiving messages from Ro of the planet Varna.
- Real People (1969). The writer Janet Belle Smith, wife of Clark Stockwell II, spends a summer at Illyria, an artist’s colony, along with assorted poets, artists, musicians, and the critic Leonard Zimmern. In sorting out her platonic from her sexual love affairs, she realizes she needs to write about Illyria, even though that means she can never return there.
- The War Between the TatesThe War Between the TatesThe War Between the Tates is a campus novel by Alison Lurie that takes place an elite university during the upheavals of the late sixties and gently and deftly skewers all sides in the turmoils and conflicts of that era — opposition to the Vietnam war, the start of the feminist movement, the...
(1974). See separate article. Features Leonard Zimmern with his wife Danielle and daughters Ruth and Celia; set at Corinth University in 1969-70. - Only Children (1979). In 1936, nine-year-old Mary Ann Hubbard (Miranda Fenn) and Lolly Zimmern (Lorin Jones), along with Lolly’s teenaged half-brother Leonard, spend a Fourth of July in the country with their parents and a teacher. The parents flirt and contemplate adultery while the children learn what they can about themselves and the world.
- Foreign AffairsForeign Affairs (novel)Foreign Affairs is a 1984 novel by Alison Lurie, which concerns itself with American academics in England. The novel won multiple awards, including the 1984 National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1985, and was made into a television movie in 1993.-Plot summary:Unmarried...
(1984); Pulitzer Prize. See separate article. Fred Stockwell Turner marries Ruth March (Zimmern). Vinnie Miner meets Chuck Mumpson and his daughter Barbie. - The Truth About Lorin Jones (1989); Prix FeminaPrix FeminaThe Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse . The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women...
Étranger. Polly Alter, divorced with a teenage son and attracted to a group of lesbians, is trying to write the story of the long-dead artist Lorin Jones. Was she a victim whose painting suffered from a series of overbearing men in her life, or an opportunist who exploited men to further her painting? Polly studies the New York art scene, New England elite college friends and teachers, Zimmern relatives, the ex-husband at Cape Cod, and the ex-lover in Key West. - The Last Resort (1998). The naturalist Wilkie Walker allows his wife Jenny to remove him from Convers College to Key West, with the idea that the latter place might be favorable for suicide. Jenny on the other hand hopes he will continue to work on his books, on which she quietly collaborates. Jenny finds love with Lee Weiss (a Zimmern cousin) at Artemis Lodge, and Wilkie decides he might as well live. Barbie and Myra Mumpson are concerned about Myra’s gay nephew.
- Truth and Consequences (2006). Corinth University architecture professor Alan MacKenzie hurts his back at a department picnic and life changes for him and his wife Jane. They get some help from Bernie Kotelchuck and his wife Danielle (formerly Zimmern). After a period of balancing giving and receiving care, they find new loves in the visiting authoress Delia Delaney and her husband. Under Delia’s influence, Alan becomes an artist.
Lurie has also published a book of short stories, Women and Ghosts. This collection of nine (or ten) 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 AmisKingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
, David Lodge
David Lodge (author)
David John Lodge CBE, is an English author.In his novels, Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular. He was brought up Catholic and has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic". Many of his characters are Catholic and their Catholicism is a major theme...
) than to the big American authors of her generation. 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
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
; 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
Thomas More
Sir Thomas More , also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor...
’s Utopia (Greek for “nowhere”) and Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
’s comment about Oakland, California, “There is no there there.” Utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
s 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, 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.
Adaptations
- The War Between the Tates was adapted as a television movieTelevision movieA television film is a feature film that is a television program produced for and originally distributed by a television network, in contrast to...
for NBC in 1977. It starred Elizabeth Ashley and Richard Crenna. - Imaginary Friends was adapted as a Thames TelevisionThames TelevisionThames Television was a licensee of the British ITV television network, covering London and parts of the surrounding counties on weekdays from 30 July 1968 until 31 December 1992....
series in 1987. Evidently the setting was moved from upstate New York to the English coast. - Foreign Affairs was adapted as a television movie in 1993, starring Joanne Woodward, Brian Dennehy, and Eric Stoltz.
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 2004.
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
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...
(1926–1995) and his partner David Jackson
David Noyes Jackson
David Noyes Jackson was the life partner of poet James Merrill . A writer and artist, Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with Merrill....
(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
- 1963-1964 Yaddo Foundation fellow
- 1965 Guggenheim FoundationJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial FoundationThe John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...
fellow - 1966 Yaddo Foundation fellow
- 1967 Rockefeller FoundationRockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...
fellow - 1978 American Academy of Arts and Letters literary award
- 1985 Pulitzer PrizePulitzer PrizeThe Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
for fiction - 1989 Prix Femina Étranger
- 2005 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and SciencesAmerican Academy of Arts and SciencesThe American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
- 2006 University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
honorary degree - 2007 University of NottinghamUniversity of NottinghamThe University of Nottingham is a public research university based in Nottingham, United Kingdom, with further campuses in Ningbo, China and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia...
honorary degree
External links
- Lurie's own biography
- Lurie archive from The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
- Three Don Swaim interviews with Lurie (1984, 1988, and 1990)