Grace PaleyGrace Paley, the American short-story writer and activist during the Vietnam period, has died of breast cancer aged 84.
Her "combative pacifism", as she called it, took her to Hanoi in 1969, to Chile during the precarious rule of Salvador Allende, and to Nicaragua in 1985.
Paley was what is known in the US as a "movement" person, which meant political activism was part of her everyday life. She joined the War Resisters' League in the 1960s and for years could be found every Saturday handing out protest leaflets on a street corner near her New York apartment.
Paley's unglamorous, day-to-day activism caused her to be admired by other movement people, but it was her short stories that made her loved. She grew up in a Jewish immigrant family amid the sounds of Russian, Yiddish and English, and became as acquainted with the idiom of New York street talk as with the language of respectable literature.
Paley was able to create in her fiction a world of voices and an ethnic style that was uniquely her own. With her humour and humanism in mind, some critics compared her with Russian-Yiddish storyteller Sholom Aleichem. But the truth is that the oral folk tradition was not lying around waiting to be inherited by a young American writer finding her voice in the 1940s. Her literary manner, which has the effect of simplicity and naturalness, owes a great deal to modernist self-consciousness about style and form.
The confidence that enabled Paley to write like a turn-of-the-century Russian or a female Mark Twain in the Bronx owed a great deal to her early years. Her parents, Isaac and Manya Goodside, were revolutionary students in Russia, and her father had spent time in prison. They were able to escape to the US in 1905 and, like so many other eastern European Jews without money, they settled in New York's Lower East Side.
Paley's father studied for a medical degree and, by the time she was born, the Goodsides had moved to the Bronx, which was then primarily Jewish and middle class. Paley was the much-loved baby in a home that included her grandmother, parents, aunt, brother of 16 and sister of 14. She recalled being encouraged by her parents to accomplish all she could.
At 19, Paley attended Hunter College and briefly New York University but, abandoning her formal education in 1942, she married Jess Paley, a cameraman and film-maker. Because her husband was serving in the army from 1942 to 1944, she lived among other women in army camps. She said it was there that she first realised that the ordinary lives of women were an actuality of great importance, albeit largely ignored in formal literature. She was writing poetry and continued after the war, when she gave birth to her two children, Nora in 1949 and Daniel in 1951.
In the 1950s Paley turned to the writing of stories: she never wrote a novel, though she tinkered with drafts. Although she was starting late, it was as if her voice was hers alone, as was her perspective on things. Critics greeted Paley's first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), with the kind of superlatives used in the same decade for first books by Flannery O'Connor and Philip Roth. Roth himself praised Paley for "a language of new and rich emotional subtleties, with a kind of backhanded grace and irony all its own". Despite this reception and many fellowships and awards, it was 15 years before Paley published her second collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.
During those years, she had to fit her writing in among a wide range of activities, some of which had as great a claim on her as fiction. Most importantly, she was raising her children. Although she and Jess Paley were not formally divorced until 1971, she was effectively a single mother during much of her children's early years. In 1972 she married a fellow writer, Robert Nichols. Paley dedicated Later the Same Day (1985), her third collection, to her children, "without whom my life and literature would be pretty slim".
Her body of work is small - Paley's Collected Stories (1994) takes up only 386 pages. For more than 20 years, she taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, but the main non-family commitment was to politics. Sometimes it was upper-case "Politics", as when, during the Vietnam war, she literally put her body on the line at sit-ins. But sometimes it was the "politics" of ordinary life, at least the ordinary life of a feminist with old-fashioned loyalties and emotions.
Paley's vicissitudes are documented in her stories about Faith Darwin, the alter ego whose perils we follow in successive collections and in Long Walks and Intimate Talks (1991), a medley of stories and poems that should be read alongside New and Collected Poems (1992).
A new book of poetry will be published next year. Paley is survived by her husband, son and daughter.
Grace Paley: born December 11th, 1922; died August 22nd, 2007