Alison Lurie

Author

• Born: September 3, 1926
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: December 3, 2020

Biography

Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, Alison Lurie grew up as an avid reader, beginning with authors such as Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, and Jane Austen at thirteen or fourteen. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947. In 1948, she married Jonathan Peale Bishop, a Cornell University professor with whom she had three sons; they were divorced in 1985, and she later married writer Edward Hower. Lurie worked as a librarian, ghostwriter, critic, essayist, novelist, and author of children’s literature. She was awarded Yaddo Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships in the years 1963, 1964, and 1965, a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1967–68, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1978, and, for Foreign Affairs, a Pulitzer Prize in 1985. She joined the English faculty at Cornell University in 1968, where her husband was also a professor. She taught courses in narrative writing and children’s literature; she retired in 1998 and became a Cornell professor emerita. Lurie published distinguished critical articles and reviews of children’s literature, including the studies Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2003), and edited a series of historical children’s books with Justin Schiller, as well as collecting and editing folktales, myths, and legends in The Heavenly Zoo (1979), Clever Gretchen, and Other Forgotten Folktales (1980), and Fabulous Beasts (1981).

In 1981, Lurie published a semiotic study of fashion in The Language of Clothes, with chapter titles such as “Clothing as a Sign System,” “Youth and Age,” “Fashion and Status,” and “Sex and Fashion.” The chapters contain useful information and clever commentary. However, Lurie is best known in American letters for her satirical novels, most of which feature American academics and their students, administrators, spouses, and friends amid sometimes comic, pathetic, or ludicrous circumstances. From Love and Friendship (1962) to her later novels, Foreign Affairs (1984), The Truth about Lorin Jones (1989), and The Last Resort (1998), Lurie reveals her incisive insight into the foibles of academics. Most of her novels feature characters who have been educated in prestigious Eastern colleges and who have lived highly privileged lives. They are generally witty, sophisticated, and usually totally lacking in self-knowledge. Most of Lurie’s characters manage to insulate themselves from genuine experience; they hide behind a facade of intellectual life. They betray spouses, children, friends, and colleagues in the petty struggles of department politics or paltry, predictable adulteries. In Love and Friendship, Lurie sharply probes the nature of love, sexuality, friendship, and various kinds of self-deceptions among the intellectuals and pseudointellectuals, faculty spouses, and bohemians who inhabit a small, self-important New England campus. Lurie exposes pretension and fraud among these desiccated middle-class professionals but does so in a spirit of fun.

In The Nowhere City (1965), Lurie places an Eastern-educated couple in sunny California. Although the characters in The Nowhere City are not interesting enough to command the reader’s sympathy, Lurie delights in exposing and savaging the emptiness of the “nowhere city,” symbolized aptly and hilariously by a twenty-foot-high cement doughnut revolving atop a restaurant. Nobody escapes Lurie’s satire: Bohemians are exposed as hypocrites and liars, academics as self-deceivers, and Hollywood actors and actors as neurotic. Lurie’s characters have difficulty finding a firm place to stand in a world drained of belief and stable values. All too easily, they become emotional drifters. Even intellectual engagement and scholarship are perilous pursuits, as a famous sociologist discovers when he is deluded by the religious cult he is studying in Imaginary Friends (1967; a story based very closely on the real-life research of Leon Festinger that resulted in the classic 1956 sociological study of Unidentified Flying Object cults, When Prophecy Fails). Marriage is generally a bankrupt institution, as Erica Tate discovers in The War between the Tates (1974); Eastern mysticism is equally empty, a condition symbolized by an impotent guru character named Zed. The War between the Tates is a devastatingly acute treatment of academe in the 1960s. It includes some marvelously comic scenes, such as when radical feminists hold a conservative philosophy professor hostage in his office.

Lurie departed from her usual academic subjects with her novel Real People (1969). In this work, Lurie exposes the pretensions and immaturity of an aspiring writer, Janet Belle Smith, who records a weeklong visit to an artists’ retreat in her journal. Here, Lurie seems to satirize the creative writing community, especially those who like to pose as writers rather than doing the hard work demanded of productive artists. Janet Belle Smith appears to be a model of what a writer should not be. Though most of her novels have contemporary settings, Lurie travels back to the years of her own childhood in her fine novel Only Children (1979). The book features two imaginative-only children, Mary Ann and Lolly, who visit a farm in Connecticut one weekend during the Depression. Lurie juxtaposes the fascinatingly complex and rich interior worlds of the young girls and the mundane world of the adults. Lurie does create one strong and energetic woman in the novel, perhaps the most admirable character in all of her fiction. Anna is devoted to her work; she believes in teaching children how to create and remain alive. She understands herself and accepts her world, but she tries to improve it by introducing educational innovations. Her allegiance to art, creativity, nature, and children is contrasted sharply with the other adults' self-deceptions, avarice, and boredom in the novel. Anna has more in common with the two bright girls than their shallow parents. Lurie’s child characters are delineated with precision and vividness, and she reveals their pain and pleasure in fine prose and exquisite detail.

Critics have praised Foreign Affairs (1984) as Lurie’s finest novel. She brings the work’s central character to life through superb use of detail and point of view. Vinnie Miner is a small, plain, unmarried, fifty-four-year-old children’s literature professor working on a scholarly study of skip-rope rhymes. Though she is tenured and has written several books, Vinnie worries that her colleagues do not accept her scholarship, especially when she reads a scathing review of her most recent book. On a plane to London, Vinnie meets a beefy, amiable engineer from Tulsa dressed in a Western-cut suit. Immediately, Vinnie feels her cultural prejudices rankle. She shuts him up with a copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886). To her surprise, Chuck reads steadily for the rest of the trip. Eventually, Vinnie enjoys a love affair with this big, loving man, who proves to be a humane, sensitive, passionate person. Critics have praised Foreign Affairs as one of the most acute portraits of Americans abroad since the novels of Henry James. Lurie knows England well and conveys a vivid sense of the country through deft description and dialogue. Foreign Affairs gives the reader more likable characters than any of Lurie’s previous novels. Though Vinnie’s lover does not survive a massive heart attack, her own humanity is clearly expanded by his love. Through Vinnie’s efforts, her colleague Fred Turner reconciles with his wife. Lurie touches the reader with her polished style and humorous tone but avoids sentimentality.

The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988) portrays Polly Alter’s research into the life and work of Lorin Jones, a painter whose life was cut short by a tragic accident and who is becoming something of a cult figure in the art world. Alter herself is a kind of 1980s hero. Though she asserts her professional identity, she feels her own sexual orientation and gender identity threatened by male chauvinists on the one hand and lesbians on the other. As Alter grows more obsessed with her research on Lorin Jones, she finds many parallels between her life and that of her subject. As her name “Alter” suggests, Lorin Jones becomes an alter ego for her. Eventually, Alter’s identity becomes more enmeshed with that of her subject, to the point that she engages in an affair with Jones’s lover. Lurie explores feminist issues and the complexities of a woman’s attempts to achieve a satisfactory sexual orientation and gender identity with appropriate ambivalence. In this novel, Lurie attempts to delineate character in more depth than in previous novels. Some reviewers complain that she does not succeed in the characterization of either Polly Alter or Lorin Jones and that the novel's happy ending does not seem to be justified. The Truth about Lorin Jones is, however, a compelling novel. Though it lacks Lurie’s usual satiric edge, it nevertheless suggests Lurie’s enormous insight and demonstrates again her narrative skills. Few American novelists in contemporary twentieth-century literature possess the wit, writing skill, and humane satiric vision apparent in Lurie’s best work.

In 2001, Lurie published a memoir of her decades-long friendship with the poet James Merrill (1926–95) and his long-time lover David Jackson, a book which, in many ways, extends Lurie’s trenchant fictional observations of the lives of academics, writers, and intellectuals to real life and the stresses that fame places on relationships. Lurie also discusses the pair’s involvement in the spirit world, a topic that repeats the themes of Imaginary Friends. In 2005, she published Truth and Consequences, another comic novel about the love lives of academics; this time, a professor of architecture laid low by a back injury and forced to rely on the care of his wife. Their marriage becomes strained; he begins an affair with a visiting professor, and his wife becomes interested in the visiting professor's husband, who is also subject to the whims of his spouse. Truth and Consequences would be Lurie's final fiction work.

Decades after the publication of The Language of Clothes, Lurie returned to the approach used for this work, this time to explore the world of architecture. In The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us (2014), she studies everything from private domiciles to prisons, hotels, and hospitals to discover what these buildings say about the people, societies, and values behind their construction. Lurie followed with another nonfiction work, Words and Worlds: From Autobiographies to Zippers in 2019.

Lurie was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and she was the New York State Author from 2012 to 2014. Lurie died on December 3, 2020, at the age of ninety-four.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Love and Friendship, 1962

The Nowhere City, 1965

Imaginary Friends, 1967

Real People, 1969

The War Between the Tates, 1974

Only Children, 1979

Foreign Affairs, 1984

The Truth About Lorin Jones, 1988

The Last Resort, 1998

Truth and Consequences, 2005

Short Fiction:

Women and Ghosts, 1994

Nonfiction:

The Language of Clothes, 1981

Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature, 1990

Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson, 2001

Boys and Girls Forever, 2003

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, 2014

Words and Worlds: From Autobiographies to Zippers, 2019

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

The Heavenly Zoo: Legends and Tales of the Stars, 1979

Clever Gretchen, and Other Forgotten Folktales, 1980

Fabulous Beasts, 1981

The Black Geese: A Baba Yaga Story from Russia, 1999 (with Jessica Souhami)

The Cat Agent, 2023

Edited Text:

The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, 1993

Bibliography

Costa, Richard Hauer. Alison Lurie. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Fox, Margalit. “Alison Lurie, Tart-Voiced Novelist of Manners, Dies at 94 (Published 2020).” The New York Times, 3 Dec. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/books/alison-lurie-dead.html. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Newman, Judie. Alison Lurie: A Critical Study. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.

Newman, Judie. “Paleface into Redskin: Cultural Transformations in Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs.” Forked Tongues: Comparing Twentieth Century British and American Literature. Edited by Ann Massa and Alistair Stead. London: Longman, 1994.

Rogers, Katherine M. “Alison Lurie: The Uses of Adultery.” American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space. Edited by Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1989.

Smith, Sarah A. “Alison Lurie Obituary - Books.” The Guardian, 4 Dec. 2020, www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/04/alison-lurie-obituary. Accessed 23 July 2024.