CALISHER, HORTENSE

born Dec. 20, 1911, New York, N.Y., U.S. American writer of novels, novellas, and short stories, known for the elegant style and insightful rendering of characters in her often semiautobiographical short fiction, much of which was published originally in The New Yorker. The daughter of a German immigrant father and an uprooted Southern mother, Calisher had a middle-class upbringing in New York City. She graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and later taught there as an adjunct professor of English. Her short-story collections In the Absence of Angels (1951) and The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (1975), a compilation of previous collections, contain stories featuring Calisher's alter ego, Hester Elkins, a Jewish child living in New York City with her extended family. The recipient of four O. Henry short-story awards, Calisher excelled in well-plotted, psychologically perceptive short fiction peopled by well-drawn characters. Her collected fiction includes Tale for the Mirror: A Novella and Other Stories (1962), Extreme Magic: A Novella and Other Stories (1964), and Saratoga, Hot (1985). Her first novel, False Entry (1961), contains characters who are reintroduced in a radically different setting in The New Yorkers (1969), in which a 12-year-old girl kills her father's unfaithful wife. Calisher's other novels include Queenie (1971), On Keeping Women (1977), Mysteries of Motion (1983), Age (1987), and In the Palace of the Movie King (1993).