Thetford, Vt. – Grace Paley, 84, an American writer who achieved literary renown as a master of the short story and created a small but influential body of work that illuminated the frustrations and joys of women’s lives, died Wednesday at her home. She had breast cancer.
Paley published only several dozen short stories and a few collections of poetry and essays, but the quality of her work attracted superlatives from the country’s brightest literary figures.
Novelist Philip Roth praised her for an “understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike.” Writer Susan Sontag called her “a rare kind of writer, a natural with a voice like no one else’s: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute.”
Paley began writing professionally in the mid-1950s. She was often regarded as a feminist writer because her stories brought early and rare insight into how urban women struggle with emotional and physical vulnerabilities; demanding children and lovers; and absent, often misogynistic husbands.
She found the feminist label confining, yet she gave credit to the movement for elevating her stature. “Every woman writing in these years has had to swim in the feminist wave,” she wrote.
Grace Goodside was born Dec. 11, 1922, in the Bronx. She was the daughter of Jewish- Ukrainian immigrants who had been dedicated anti-czarists and punished with exile. The family name was changed from Gutseit to Goodside upon arrival in New York.
In the early 1940s, she studied under English poet W.H. Auden at the New School for Social Research in New York.
In 1942, she married Jess Paley, a movie cameraman. They had two children before divorcing: Nora Paley, now of Thetford, and Danny Paley, now of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Survivors also include her second husband, author Robert Nichols of Thetford, whom she married in 1972, and seven grandchildren.
As a young mother, Paley drifted away from writing for more than a decade and became involved in community activism in Greenwich Village.
During the Vietnam War, she encouraged young men to avoid military service and participated in rallies against the war.
She once spent time at Greenwich Village’s Women’s House of Detention for blocking a military parade.
