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23 Grace Paley The obvious thing about Grace Paley’s work and life is her radical intervention in the stream of American literature of the mid- and late twentieth century. Radical in language, subjects, politics, she came on like an original blast of fresh air at the end of the formalist fifties, the almost entirely male-dominated literature of the fifties. I remember the pleasure well, the rapture even, of that voice when her short stories began appearing. There were the rhythms of New York speech, inflected with the Jewish rhythms and intonations of her upbringing and surroundings, alive with its snap, crackle, pop—a bit of Odets, some of Bellow, an anticipation of Philip Roth even, some Edna Millay and Emma Goldman in her sexual freedoms, but wholly original, her own, always a woman’s voice, with its concerns about Papa, Mama, aunts; about the playgrounds of Brooklyn and the Village and the young mothers of different races, united in the haze of their glory and confusion about what comes next, the outrage that fueled their feminist politics and left positions. All of that was Grace. The first time I saw her I thought she was a bag woman the way she dressed, unconcerned about the niceties and expectations, though at a Feminist Press event in later years I sat next to her and saw that she could manage a more conventional appearance. But that first image remains as a 24 badge of honor in my book. It coexists with the first time I saw Dorothy Day in the home of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon around 1952 in Minneapolis. The Tates wanted Dorothy Day to talk about her religion (Allen Tate had recently converted to Catholicism), but she insisted on talking about the grave diggers’ strike then in progress in New York. She and her paper, The Catholic Worker, had taken the side courageously, as usual, of the strikers against the Cardinal. She too dressed like a bag lady; she too spoke New York. She and Grace Paley occupy my private pantheon of sisterhood and sainthood. Grace Paley ...

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