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, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.

Early life

Lurie was born in Chicago but grew up in White Plains, New York. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947.^[1] The next year she married Jonathan Peale Bishop, a graduate student at Harvard. Bishop was a critic and essayist, who became a writer of autobiographically-inflected books about Catholic Christianity.

Novels

Lurie's first novel was Love and Friendship (1962), followed in 1965 by The Nowhere City, about Los Angeles, California, where Lurie lived from 1957 to 1961. Two novels set in New England appeared in 1967 and 1969: Imaginary Friends and Real People. Imaginary Friends, about a group of people who believe they are communicating with extraterrestrials, became a Thames Television series in 1987.

In 1974, Lurie published The War Between the Tates, set in a Cornell-like "Corinth University," and this was adapted to a television movie for NBC. Only Children, set in the New England of the 1930s, appeared in 1979.

Lurie's most famous book, Foreign Affairs, involves American academics in England and was the basis of a television film. The Truth About Lorin Jones (1989) concerns the efforts of a biographer to investigate the life of a woman artist. The Last Resort 1998 is set in Key West, Florida. Lurie's most recent novel, Truth and Consequences, takes place in a town and at a university resembling Ithaca and Cornell and focusses on two couples coping badly with the roles of caregiver and care-receiver.

Professional life

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.

Alison Lurie has also been interested in children's literature, co-editing the Garland Library of Children's Classics (73 vol.) and often reviewing the subject for the New York Review of Books. In 1990, she published Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature. A further collection of essays on children's literature, Boys and Girls Forever, appeared in 2004. Lurie taught literature, folklore, and writing at Cornell University from 1968 to 2006,^[1], first as a lecturer, later being appointed to full professor in 1979.^[1] Lurie has three children^[1] and is currently married to the writer Edward Hower.

Awards

• 1963-1964 Yaddo Foundation fellow
• 1965 Guggenheim Foundation fellow
• 1966 Yaddo Foundation fellow
• 1967 Rockefeller Foundation fellow
• 1978 American Academy of Arts and Letters literary award
• 1985 Pulitzer Prize for fiction
• 1989 Prix Femina Étranger
• 2005 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[2]
• 2006 University of Oxford honorary degree
• 2007 University of Nottingham honorary degree

Notes

References

• Magill, Frank N. (ed.) (1991) "Alison Lurie" Critical Survey of Long Fiction: English Language Series (rev.ed.) Salem Press, Pasadena, California, vol. 5, pp. 2126-2134, ISBN 0-89356-830-9 (vol 5)

External links

• Lurie's own biography at Cornell

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