orig. Grace Goodside
born Dec. 11, 1922, New York, N.Y., U.S.
U.S. short-story writer and poet.
Paley's first languages were Russian and Yiddish, a circumstance that may have some bearing on her ability to vividly reproduce in her fiction a variety of accents and speech mannerisms. She was active in the opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and continued her political activism after the war ended. Her stories, compassionate and often comic explorations of family and neighbourhood life and of individuals struggling against loneliness, are collected in The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day (1985). Her poetry appears in Leaning Forward (1985) and Begin Again (1992).