Grace Paley, writer and activist dies

“I’m not writing a history of famous people,” she said. “I am interested in a history of everyday life.”

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died on Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84.

Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind. (New York Times, August 23, 2007)

Grace Paley is best known for her three collections of short stories, “The Little Disturbances of Man” (1959), “Enormus Changes at the Last Minute” (1974), and “Later That Same Day” (1985). She taught Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence. Her “Collected Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. (The collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus this year.) From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York’s first official state author; she was also a past poet laureate of Vermont.