Alison Stewart Lurie (September 3, 1926December 3, 2020) was an American novelist and academic. She won the 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.
Life
Alison Stewart Lurie was born on September 3, 1926, in Chicago, and raised in White Plains, New York. Her father Harry Lawrence Lurie was a sociologist, and her mother Bernice Lurie (née Stewart) was a journalist and book critic. Her father was the first executive director of the National Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Due to complications with a forceps delivery, she was born deaf in one ear and with damage to her facial muscles. part in Ithaca, New York; and part in Key West, Florida. In 1981, she published The Language of Clothes, a non-fiction book about the semiotics of dress. Her discussion in Language of Clothes has been compared to Roland Barthes' The Fashion System (1985).
Lurie died from natural causes while under hospice care in Ithaca on December 3, 2020, at age 94.
Lurie's personal papers are archived at Cornell University.
Themes
Lurie's novels often featured professors in starring roles, and were frequently set at academic institutions. With their light touch and focus on portraying the emotions of well-educated adulterers, her works bear more resemblance to some 20th-century British authors (such as Kingsley Amis and David Lodge) rather than to the major American authors of her generation. A 2003 profile of Lurie, styled as a review of her Boys and Girls Forever, a work of criticism, observed that Lurie's works are often "witty and astute comedies of manners". Lurie noted that her writing was grounded in a "desire to laugh at things". The author also incorporated some of her own experiences into her fiction. In The Nowhere City, there is a character based on actress Sheree North. "I did have a job answering her fan mail," Lurie recalled. Lurie also used some of Sheree's friends as characters but "tried to change them all a little, so as not to annoy anybody."
Literary critic John W. Aldridge gave a mixed assessment of Lurie's oeuvre in The American Novel and the Way We Live Now (1983). He notes that Lurie's work "has a satirical edge that, when it is not employed in hacking away at the obvious, is often eviscerating", but also remarks that "there is … something hobbled and hamstrung about her engagement in experience".
Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.
Bibliography
Novels
- Love and Friendship (1962)
- Imaginary Friends (1967)
Short Story Collection
- Women and Ghosts (1994)
- Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales (1980)
Non-fiction
- The Language of Clothes (1981)
- Words and Worlds: From Autobiographies to Zippers (2019)
- 1965: Guggenheim Foundation fellow
- 1966: Yaddo Foundation fellow
- 1978: American Academy of Arts and Letters literary award
- 1989: elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- 2005: elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 2006: University of Oxford honorary degree
- 2007: University of Nottingham honorary degree
- 2012–2014: New York State Author