1. Grace Paley, Goodside, was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.
29 Facts About Grace Paley
1. 2.
Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside on December 11,1922, in the Bronx, to Jewish parents, Isaac Goodside and Manya Goodside, who were originally from Ukraine, and espoused socialism, especially her mother.
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Fourteen years younger than her sister, Jeanne, and 16 years younger than her brother, Victor, Grace Paley was described as being a tomboy as a child.
4.
Grace Paley spent a lot of time in playgrounds when her children were young.
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Grace Paley has always been very active in the feminist and peace movements.
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Grace Paley did not receive a degree from either institution.
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Early in her writing career, Grace Paley experienced a number of rejections for her submitted works.
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Grace Paley published her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man with Doubleday.
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Grace 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.
10.
Grace Paley published an essay collection, Just As I Thought, in 1999.
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Grace Paley contributed the piece "Why Peace Is a Feminist Issue" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.
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Grace Paley subsequently served on the faculty at City College and taught courses at Columbia University.
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Grace Paley taught at Syracuse University and served as vice president of the PEN American Center, an organization she'd worked to diversify in the 1980s.
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Grace Paley worked with the American Friends Service Committee to establish neighborhood peace groups, helping found the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961.
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Grace Paley met her second husband, Robert Nichols, through the anti-Vietnam War peace movement.
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Grace Paley was arrested on a number of occasions, including spending a week in the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village.
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Grace Paley organized one of the first "abortion speak-outs" in the 1960s after having an abortion herself in the 1950s and then struggling to obtain a second one a few years later.
18.
Grace Paley's Jewish background was a vital part of her identity and work, and she found community in her local synagogue in Vermont in her later years, she was raised agnostic, with her father refusing to go to temple entirely.
19.
Grace Paley married fellow poet and anti-war activist Robert Nichols later that year.
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Grace Paley was a decades-long resident of West 11th Street in New York's Greenwich Village, where she raised her children, Nora and Danny.
21.
Grace Paley did not learn to drive until she was 55.
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Grace Paley began spending summers in Thetford, Vermont, with Nichols beginning in the 1970s; the couple eventually settled there permanently in the early '90s.
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Grace Paley died at the age of 84, after undergoing treatment for breast cancer for some time.
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Grace Paley left behind her husband, her two children and three grandchildren.
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Grace Paley's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and the Edith Wharton Award Certification of Merit.
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Grace Paley received an honorary degree from Dartmouth University in 1998.
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Grace Paley was named the first official New York State Author in 1986, and she was named poet laureate of Vermont in 2003.
28.
In 2004, as a part of the F Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, Paley received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature.
29.
At Dartmouth College's annual Social Justice Awards ceremony in 2006, Paley received the Lester B Granger '18 Award for Lifetime Achievement.