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LURIE, Alison

Born 3 September 1926, Chicago, Illinois

Daughter of Harry and Bernice Stewart Lurie; married Jonathan P. Bishop Jr., 1948 (divorced); Edward Hower, 1995; children: John, Jeremy, Joshua

The daughter of a sociology professor father turned Jewish-welfare administrator, and a mother who had been a journalist, Alison Lurie was encouraged to explore her creativity at an early age. An "odd-looking," partially deaf child, Lurie predicted she would become one of the "old maids" she voraciously read about in Victorian and Edwardian children's books.

After graduating from Radcliffe (B.A., 1947), Lurie worked as a manuscript reader for Oxford University before marrying in 1948. Although she had sold three poems and a short story while in college, she published nothing until her privately printed memoir of her friend Violet Ranney (Bunny) Lang appeared in 1959. The memoir, reprinted commercially in 1975, focuses on Lang's career and the beginnings of the Poets' Theater of Cambridge.

Lurie's first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), explores the academic milieu figuring prominently in her life and her novels. A member of the English faculty at Cornell University beginning in 1969, Lurie sets several of her multilayered satirical novels at universities. In Love and Friendship, Emily Turner suddenly realizes she no longer loves her adoring professor-husband.

Lurie's characters are well-educated middle class or upper-middle class people who have, for a brief time, taken themselves or what they do too seriously. The Nowhere City (1966) explores several dichotomies: East-West, male-female, and past-present. In Imaginary Friends (1967), Lurie satirizes both religious cults and academia, exploring the pressure on professors to publish as well as the apathy some exhibit regarding their power over students. Real People (1969) draws on Lurie's experiences at Yaddo, an upstate New York artists' retreat, to describe Illyria, where "one becomes one's real self."

The title of Lurie's fourth novel, The War Between the Tates (1974), works on various levels: it refers to Erica and Brian Tate's marital problems, to the difficulty of their children's budding adolescence, and to the parallel between the war in Vietnam and the battle between the sexes and the generations. In Only Children (1979), Lurie's narrative point of view alternates between eight-year-old Mary Ann and an objective third person. The novel satirizes adult responsibility, love, beauty, and moral values.

Lurie masters the use of metaphor in Foreign Affairs (1984), in which a little dog represents self-pity. Vinnie Miner, an Anglophile professor of children's literature on sabbatical in England, resembles her creator. An affair between Vinnie and Chuck Mumpson, a stereotypical Oklahoman tourist, forces her to reconsider her concept of reality. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize (1985). Lurie's other awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim (1965) and Rockefeller (1967) foundations.

In The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988), museum curator Polly Alter undergoes a journey toward self-discovery while trying to learn about Lorin Jones, a painter who had died many years before. Although some critics dismissed the novel as frivolous, it explores difficult choices, and has many satirical moments. By ostensibly stereotyping both gender roles and sexual preference, Lurie speaks profoundly about the backlash against feminism. The novel also reflects on the futility of seeking the truth: as Polly struggles to sort out the myriad perceptions she has gathered about Lorin, she realizes no one she interviewed was "lying…everyone had told her the truth as he or she knew or imagined it."

Lurie's long-term interest in children's literature is illustrated in such gatherings and translations of children's tales from around the world as The Heavenly Zoo (1970), Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales (1980), and Fabulous Beasts (1981). In Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature (1990), she examines underlying texts in children's stories, ranging from folk-and fairy tales and gothic novels through such modern writers as J. R. R. Tolkien and Richard Adams. According to Lurie, most children's literature maintains the status quo, but the books in which she takes pleasure undermine current assumptions and express alternate views of the world.

Lurie's diversity of interests takes yet another form in The Language of Clothes (1981). Explaining fashion as a nonverbal language of signs, she shows the influence political climates have historically had on dress and costume.

Lurie's Women and Ghosts (1994) is a collection of nine short stories about women who are plagued by a selection of thoroughly modern and entertaining ghosts—not all of which are human. A dieting woman is pursued by fat ghosts; another woman is chaperoned on dates by her whining, deceased fiancé; another is pestered and attacked by a piece of antique furniture that refuses to be placed in a museum. In perhaps the best of these tales, Dinah is confronted by the ghost of her fiancé's first wife, Ilse, who is passed out in a drunken stupor at her kitchen table. Dinah begins to investigate Ilse's fate and finds out enough about her beloved Gregor to make her run for her own safety.

The Last Resort (1998) is a novel set in Key West and populated by a wide range of characters befitting the schizophrenic nature of the area itself. Jenny Walker pushes her husband, Wilkie, to spend the winter in Key West, which she believes will help his depression. Wilkie, however, believes he is dying of cancer and is planning to commit suicide. Jenny, 25 years his junior, has her own issues and falls in love with a gay member of the Key West community. Essentially a comedy of characters and events, The Last Resort has underlying agendas of antienvironmentalism and gay activism.

In a return to juvenile literature, The Black Geese: A Baba Yaga Story from Russia, Lurie reprises the powerful witch from Russian folklore, Baba Yaga, first encountered in The Heavenly Zoo. Elena is charged with watching her little brother. The boy is taken away by the black geese who belong to Baba Yaga, and Elena must find a way to get him back. A well-illustrated book, this may be a classic in the making.