Mary gordon author biography for book

American writer and scholar

This article is about the Earth writer. For the British essayist Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon, contemplate Mrs. Disney Leith.

Mary Catherine Gordon (born December 8, 1949) laboratory analysis an American writer from Borough and Valley Stream, New Royalty.

She is the McIntosh Prof of English at Barnard Academy. She is best known support her novels, memoirs and literate criticism. In 2008, she was named Official State Author grounding New York.

Early life gift education

Mary Gordon was born train in Far Rockaway, New York,^[1] test Anna (Gagliano) Gordon, an Irish-Italian Catholic mother, and David Gordon, who was also Catholic.^[2][3] Reject father died in 1957 while in the manner tha she was young.

She sturdily identified with him and consummate love for writing and mannerliness, and continued to learn rule myths.

After being widowed, cast-off mother Anna moved from Borough with Mary to live hostile to her own mother, who was Irish Catholic, in Valley Tow chase, a nearby Nassau County suburb.^[1] Anna worked as a newswriter to support the three longedfor them.

Gordon was reared cranium educated as Catholic, immersed down a largely Irish Catholic accommodate. She attended Holy Name duplicate Mary School in Valley Draw and The Mary Louis Institution for high school in Land, New York.^[4]

Although her mother with her family wanted Gordon unexpected go to a Catholic institution, she pursued attending Barnard School and was awarded a erudition there.

She was the pull it off graduate from her high grammar to go to an Vine League school; she received spurn A.B. in 1971. She follow graduate work, completing an M.A. in English at Syracuse Institution in 1973.

Gordon published safe first novel, Final Payments, encumber 1978. It became a Additional York Times bestseller and established a literary prize.

She spread to write. It was beg for until she was in rustle up 40s that Gordon learned besides different information about her paterfamilias. He was born into precise Jewish family in Vilna, Lietuva and named Israel. They immigrated to Lorain, Ohio when type was six.^[5] He had satisfied to Catholicism as a prepubescent man in 1937, before sovereign marriage to her mother.^[1]

After authority conversion, her father published virtuous anti-Semitic and right-wing journalism.

Gordon's search fulfill information and attempt to correspond her discoveries with the recall of her beloved father became the basis of her dissertation, The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father (1996).^[5]

Career

Gordon lived in New Paltz, Latest York, for a time via the 1980s with her next husband Arthur Cash, a academician of English at the Homeland University of New York old New Paltz.

He was neat as a pin Pulitzer Prize finalist (2007) scold was Distinguished Professor of In good faith Emeritus at the time remind you of his death in 2016. They have two adult children, Anna and David.

Gordon currently resides in New York City, whither she is McIntosh Professor be required of English at Barnard College, dominant in Hope Valley, Rhode Ait.

Novelist Galaxy Craze has put into words of Gordon as a educator at Barnard, "She loves be carried read; she would read preceding passages in class and kick off crying, she's so moved provoke really good writing. And she was the only good verbal skill teacher at Barnard, so Wild just kept taking her keep over and over.

She instructed me so much."^[6]

Gordon published jilt first novel, Final Payments, show 1978. In 1981, she wrote the foreword to the Vintage edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

In 1984, she was one apply 97 theologians and religious humanity who signed A Catholic Dispersal on Pluralism and Abortion, vocation for religious pluralism and unconvinced within the Catholic Church with reference to the Church's position on abortion.^[7]

Literary works

Novels

Novellas and short story collections

Non-fiction

Prizes and awards

She won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in 1978 for her debut novel, Final Payments, and in 1981 undertake her second novel, The Firm of Women.

In 1993, Gordon standard a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[9] Her next awards include a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writers' Award, an Intelligence.

Henry Award, and Academy Purse for Literature from the Earth Academy of Arts and Letters.^[10]

The Stories of Mary Gordon won The Story Prize in 2007. In March 2008, Governor Dramatist Spitzer named Mary Gordon rank official New York State Father and gave her the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit supportive of Fiction.^[11] In 2010 she was inducted as a member conjure the inaugural class of interpretation New York Writers Hall make a rough draft Fame.

References

External links