Berlin, Lucia

Lucia Brown Berlin (November 12, 1936 – November 12, 2004) was an American short story writer. She had a small, devoted following, but did not reach a mass audience during her lifetime. She rose to sudden literary fame eleven years after her death, in August 2015, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux's publication of a volume of selected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women, edited by Stephen Emerson. It hit The New York Times bestseller list in its second week, and within a few weeks, had outsold all her previous books combined.

Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, and spent her childhood on the move, following her father's career as a mining engineer. The family lived in mining camps in Idaho, Montana and Arizona, and Chile, where Lucia spent most of her youth. As an adult, she lived in New Mexico, Mexico, Northern and Southern California, and Colorado.

Berlin began publishing relatively late in life, under the encouragement and sometimes tutelage of poet Ed Dorn. Her first small collection, Angels Laundromat, was published in 1981, but her published stories were written as early as 1960. She published seventy-six stories in her lifetime. Several of her stories appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic and Saul Bellow's The Noble Savage. Berlin published six collections of short stories, but most of her work can be found in three later volumes from Black Sparrow Books: Homesick: New and Selected Stories (1990), So Long: Stories 1987-92 (1993) and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98 (1999).

Berlin was never a bestseller, but was widely influential within the literary community.[citation needed] She has been compared to Raymond Carver and Richard Yates.[citation needed] Her one-page story "My Jockey", consisting of five paragraphs, won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985. Berlin also won an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2015, a compendium of her short story work was released under the title, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Short Stories. It debuted at #18 on the New York Times bestseller list its first week, and rose to #15 on the regular list the following week. The collection was ineligible for most of the year-end awards (either because she was deceased, or it was recollected material), but was named to a large number of year-end lists, including the New York Times Book Reviews "10 Best Books of 2015". It debuted at #14 on the ABA's Indie bestseller list and #5 on the LA Times' list. It was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

Throughout her life, Berlin earned a living through a series of working class jobs, reflected in story titles like "Manual for Cleaning Women," "Emergency Room Notebook, 1977," and "Private Branch Exchange" (referring to telephone switchboards and their operators).

Up through the early 1990s, Berlin taught creative writing in a number of venues, including the San Francisco County Jail and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She also took oral histories from elderly patients at Mt. Zion Hospital.

In the fall of 1994, Berlin began a two-year teaching position as Visiting Writer at University of Colorado, Boulder. Near the end of her term, she was one of four campus faculty awarded the Student Organization for Alumni Relations Award for Teaching Excellence. "To win a teaching award after two years is unheard of," the English Chair Katherine Eggert said later in an obituary. Berlin was asked to stay on at the end of her two-year term. She was named associate professor, and continued teaching there until 2000.

Berlin was married three times and had four sons.

Berlin was plagued by health problems, including double scoliosis. Her crooked spine punctured one of her lungs, and she was never seen without an oxygen tank beside her from 1994 until her death. She retired when her condition grew too severe to work, and she later developed lung cancer. She struggled with radiation therapy, which she said felt like having one's bones ground to dust. As her health and finances deteriorated, Berlin moved into a trailer park on the edge of Boulder, and later, a converted garage behind her son's house outside Los Angeles. The move allowed her to be closer to her sons, and made breathing easier (Boulder's elevation had exacerbated her lung problems). Lucia died in her home in Marina del Rey, on her 68th birthday, with one of her favorite books in her hands.

Wikipedia contributors, "Lucia Berlin," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lucia_Berlin&oldid=974448628 (accessed August 26, 2020).