Paley, Grace, 1922-2007

Grace Paley (b. Grace Goodside, Dec. 11, 1922, Bronx, NY-d. Aug. 22, 2007, Thetford, VT) attended Hunter College and The New School where she studied with W. H. Auden. She married June 20, 1942, Grace Goodside married cinematographer Jess Paley in 1942 and had two children before getting divorced. Paley married poet Robert Nichols 1n 1972. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College. Her first collection was published in 1959.

A known pacifist and social activist, Paley joined the War Resisters League during Vietnam War. She received many honors in her lifetime including the Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction (1961), election to the National Academy of Arts and Letters (1980), the Edith Wharton Award (1983), first official New York State Writer (1989), the Rea Award for the Short Story (1993), Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1993), PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction (1994), the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts (1994), and was the Vermont State Poet Laureate (2003-2007).

Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.

She was born Grace Goodside in the Bronx to Jewish parents, Isaac Goodside and the former Manya Ridnyik, socialists originally from Ukraine. They had immigrated after a period of exile, Grace's mother to Germany and her father to Siberia, changing their name from Gutseit as they settled in New York. The family spoke Russian and Yiddish at home, and eventually English. Grace had an older brother and sister.

Paley dropped out of high school at 16; she attended Hunter College for a year and studied briefly with W. H. Auden at the New School. She married a film cameraman, Jess Paley, when she was 19. The Paleys had two children, Nora (born 1949) and Danny (born 1951), but later divorced.

Paley's first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), featured 11 stories of New York life. Though ultimately more widely known for her short fiction, Paley also published several volumes of poetry and a collection of essays in the course of her career. She taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College from 1966 to 1989 and subsequently at City College, Columbia University, and Syracuse University. She served as vice president of the PEN American Center, an organization she had worked to diversify in the 1980s.

Paley was known for pacifism and political activism. The FBI declared her a communist and kept a file on her for 30 years. Beginning in the 1950s, Paley joined friends in protesting nuclear proliferation and American militarization. She also worked with the American Friends Service Committee to establish neighborhood peace groups, helping to found the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961; she met her second husband through the anti-Vietnam War peace movement. She was arrested on a number of occasions and came to national prominence in 1969 when she accompanied a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war.

She married fellow poet and activist Robert Nichols in 1972. The couple published a book together expressing their shared activism through poetry and prose, Here and Somewhere Else, in 2007. Paley was a decades-long resident of New York's Greenwich Village; she began spending summers in Thetford, Vermont, with Nichols in the 1970s, and the couple settled there permanently in the early 1990s. Her Jewish background was a vital part of her identity and work; she found community in her local synagogue in Vermont in her later years, although she had been raised agnostic.

Paley died at the age of 84, having undergone treatment for breast cancer.