American novelist and academic, she won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children’s literature and the semiotics of dress.
She was Professor of English at Cornell University since 1976. Her first novel, Love and Friendship, was published in 1976. Lurie is the author of ten novels, her most recent book was The Last Resort (1998). Three of Lurie’s novels – Foreign Affairs, The War Between the Tates and Imaginary Friends have been adapted for television.
Alison Lurie was the older of two daughters of Harry and Bernice (Stewart) Lurie. Her father, Latvian-born, was a scholar and a teacher of social work. He became the founder and executive director of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. He and Bernice, a former journalist with the Detroit Free Press, were both socialists. The Luries moved to New York City when Alison was four. Soon afterward, they moved to the suburb of White Plains in Westchester County. She and her sister Jennifer attended mostly private schools. She briefly attended a public high school before entering a progressive preparatory school, Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Connecticut.
She began to write at an early age and was praised for expressing creative and imaginative ability, “the only thing she had going for her.” Alison was skinny, plain, odd-looking, and deaf in one ear from a birth injury with resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that by her own account, “pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer.”
She graduated from Cherry Lawn School in 1943 and Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1947. She continued to write even while working full-time as an editorial assistant for the Oxford University Press in New York City. She became a professor of English at Cornell University, where she taught courses in creative writing and folklore and children’s literature.
Her first published novel was Love and Friendship (1962). Lurie’s first best-seller and fifth novel was The War Between the Tates (1974).
She won the Pulitzer Prize for her seventh novel, Foreign Affairs (1984). In addition to the Pulitzer, she has won the Priz Femina Etranger, (in 1989 for About Lorin Jones, and received grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and a Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences).
Alison Lurie married Jonathan Peale Bishop, a graduate student in English at Harvard University, on 10 September 1948. They had three sons, John, Jeremy and Joshua Bishop. She separated from her husband in 1975, and a year or so later formed a close relationship with novelist Edward Hower, whom she later married. She taught only part-time at Cornell, in the fall semester, so that she could spend some months of the year in London, and then in Key West, Florida. She and Edward travelled together to writer’s workshops and made joint presentations.
Lurie died from natural causes while under hospice care in Ithaca, New York, on 3 December 2020 at age 94.
Link to Wikipedia biography