Alison Lurie Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Alison Stewart Lurie was born on September 3, 1926, in Chicago and grew up in White Plains, New York. Her father, Harry Lawrence Lurie, was a noted social worker and scholar of social policy, and her mother, Bernice (Stewart) Lurie, worked as a journalist and book reviewer. Books, conversation, and close observation of social manners were constants in the household, and those early influences nourished the wit, skepticism, and psychological acuity that would later define her fiction. Lurie studied history and literature at Radcliffe College, graduating in 1947, and began to write steadily, finding in the novel a form capacious enough to hold the lives of academics, artists, and ordinary suburbanites with equal sympathy and satirical bite.

Emergence as a Novelist
Lurie's early novels established her voice as a comic moralist attentive to the gap between public persona and private desire. Love and Friendship (1962) and The Nowhere City (1965) introduced readers to her unsentimental clarity. Imaginary Friends (1967) and Real People (1969) probed belief, authorship, and the fragile boundary between invention and reality. With The War Between the Tates (1974), she achieved wide recognition; its portrayal of marital upheaval and campus turmoil at a fictional upstate university made her one of the sharpest chroniclers of academic life in America. Only Children (1979) turned to the intricacies of childhood perceptions, a perspective she would revisit in criticism and essays.

Academic Life and Cornell
Lurie built a long association with Cornell University, where she taught in the Department of English and became known for courses that treated children's literature with the seriousness it deserves. She eventually held a named professorship in American literature and later became professor emerita. Her presence at Cornell placed her among generations of students and writers, and the rhythms of campus politics, faculty alliances, and the rituals of university life gave her fiction both setting and substance. Colleagues, friends, and students at Ithaca formed a community that sustained her writing life for decades.

Major Works and Themes
Foreign Affairs (1984), set largely in London, is the novel that brought Lurie the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; its intertwined stories of American scholars abroad balance romance with sober reflection on age, national character, and the consolations of reading. The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988) follows a biographer unraveling the life of a painter, exploring how narratives about women are constructed and contested. In The Last Resort (1998), a renowned naturalist seeks renewal in Key West, and Lurie examines mortality, marriage, and reinvention with her characteristic mixture of irony and compassion. Truth and Consequences (2005) returns to the pressures a long marriage endures when illness, ambition, and self-deception collide. Across these works, Lurie's prose is lucid and dryly funny, her empathy unsentimental, and her satire precise but humane.

Nonfiction, Criticism, and Children's Literature
Beyond her novels, Lurie's essays and criticism made a lasting mark. The Language of Clothes (1981) reads dress as a social code, bringing anthropological curiosity and literary tact to everyday appearance. In Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2004), she argues for the sophistication of classic children's books and the subversive pleasures they offer to young readers. She edited The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (1993), tracing how modern writers reimagined a traditional form. The Language of Houses (2014) extends her interest in cultural sign systems to architecture and interiors. A close friendship with the poet James Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, produced the memoir Familiar Spirits (2001), a portrait of artistic collaboration and belief that is as much about friendship and ethics as it is about the occult practices that fascinated her subjects. Lurie also contributed for years to journals and reviews, writing criticism that combined curiosity with a refusal to condescend.

Personal Life
In the late 1940s Lurie married the literary scholar Jonathan Bishop; they had three sons and shared a life that connected writing and university work. Their marriage ended many years later. She later married the novelist Edward Hower, whose companionship in Ithaca and shared devotion to storytelling and teaching helped anchor her later decades. The everyday conversations with family, the intellectual atmosphere of campus life, and friendships with writers and artists all fed her understanding of how people talk, love, and mislead themselves.

Later Years and Legacy
Lurie continued to write into her late years, refining her interest in how manners encode power, how institutions shape private life, and how travel reveals and rearranges identity. She died on December 3, 2020, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of ninety-four. By then she had become a touchstone for readers who cherish fiction that is comic without cruelty and serious without solemnity. Her novels endure for their pitch-perfect dialogue and their clear-eyed attention to the fragile treaties on which marriages, friendships, and communities rest. Her essays on fashion, houses, and children's literature expand the reach of her project: to take everyday culture seriously, and to translate its unspoken languages into stories that make us see ourselves more clearly.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Alison, under the main topics: Honesty & Integrity - War - Travel.

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