The Little Disturbances of Man

Grace Paley (1922-2007) was born in the Bronx to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents who had fled Ukraine, and she grew up in a household where Yiddish, Russian, and English all mingled. That polyglot, immigrant New York shaped her ear for speech and the voices that fill her fiction. Best known for her short stories, she published only three slim collections, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day (1985), yet she became one of the most influential American storytellers of her generation. Her stories return again and again to working-class Jewish neighborhoods, to mothers, grandmothers, and aging immigrants, and to the talky, humane, ironic idiom of Yiddish-inflected urban speech. Her recurring alter ego, Faith Darwin, navigates family, friendship, and politics with a comic wisdom that echoes the Yiddish storytelling tradition of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, while insisting on the dignity of women’s everyday lives.

Paley’s Jewish heritage also informed her values as an activist: she was a lifelong pacifist, feminist, and antiwar and antinuclear campaigner, and she often described her political commitments and her art as growing from the same roots of community, argument, and moral responsibility. A longtime teacher at Sarah Lawrence College and City College of New York, she served as the first official New York State Author (1986-1988) and received the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit. Her honors include the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Collected Stories (1994). She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.