Grace Paley...

Born in the Bronx,( Dec. 11, 1922— died Aug. 22, 2007), New York, Paley was the youngest child of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. She grew up in a socialist, intellectual household amid a babble of three languages;Yiddish, Russian, and English.

As a writer of fiction, Paley would pick up on the music of all three tongues, celebrating their rhythms and idioms.
From an early age, she wrote poetry, and at age 17 she took a course with the British poet W. H. Auden.

As a student Paley attended Hunter College and New York University.

She married early, in 1942, and settled with her husband in Greenwich Village, where they raised two children (the marriage would eventually end in divorce). In this community of artists, intellectuals, and bohemians, Paley became involved in leftist politics. She frequented anti-war and anti-nuclear demonstrations, and she became engaged in local issues.

As a young mother in the mid-1950s, Paley made her initial forays into writing fiction. The urge to tell stories had begun to grow in her, but the responsibilities of motherhood called. Falling ill one day, she arranged for her children to attend an after-school program while she convalesced. Paley was not too ill to sit at a typewriter, however, and the extra hours of quiet and solitude were all she needed to begin writing fiction.

Paley's stories explored the everyday lives of her contemporaries, focusing most attentively on the lives of women. The dreams and goals of her female characters, independent, strong-minded, and often idealistic, propelled these narratives forward.

She was perhaps the first writer to explore, with gritty realism, the lives and experiences of divorced mothers.

Some critics point to her early stories as the beginnings of a feminist literature, written years before the women's movement of the 1970s.

When she was not writing or protesting, Paley was teaching. Like most authors, she needed a source of income to supplement earnings from the occasional publication. Though her original motivation to teach was financial, Paley grew to enjoy the work and even to gain inspiration from it.

It was the short story that Paley had mastered as an art form. Late in her life, she remains one of America's most esteemed authors.