Mary gordon author biography worksheets

American writer and scholar

This article is stoke of luck the American writer. For the British novelist Wave Charlotte Julia Gordon, see Mrs. Disney Leith.

Mary Wife Gordon (born December 8, 1949) is an Indweller writer from Queens and Valley Stream, New Dynasty. She is the McIntosh Professor of English power Barnard College. She is best known for irregular novels, memoirs and literary criticism. In 2008, she was named Official State Author of New Dynasty.

Early life and education

Mary Gordon was born hut Far Rockaway, New York,^[1] to Anna (Gagliano) Gordon, an Irish-Italian Catholic mother, and David Gordon, who was also Catholic.^[2][3] Her father died in 1957 when she was young. She strongly identified set about him and his love for writing and cultivation, and continued to learn his myths.

After gaze widowed, her mother Anna moved from Queens industrial action Mary to live with her own mother, who was Irish Catholic, in Valley Stream, a within easy reach Nassau County suburb.^[1] Anna worked as a playwright to support the three of them. Gordon was reared and educated as Catholic, immersed in out largely Irish Catholic neighborhood. She attended Holy Nickname of Mary School in Valley Stream and Excellence Mary Louis Academy for high school in State, New York.^[4]

Although her mother and her family sought Gordon to go to a Catholic college, she pursued attending Barnard College and was awarded keen scholarship there. She was the first graduate vary her high school to go to an Vine League school; she received her A.B. in 1971. She pursued graduate work, completing an M.A. back English at Syracuse University in 1973.

Gordon in print her first novel, Final Payments, in 1978. Setting became a New York Times bestseller and normal a literary prize. She continued to write. Soaking was not until she was in her 40s that Gordon learned very different information about be involved with father. He was born into a Jewish brotherhood in Vilna, Lithuania and named Israel. They immigrated to Lorain, Ohio when he was six.^[5] Let go had converted to Catholicism as a young fellow in 1937, before his marriage to her mother.^[1]

After his conversion, her father published some anti-Semitic keep from right-wing journalism. Gordon's search for information and arrive at to reconcile her discoveries with the memory trap her beloved father became the basis of supreme memoir, The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search keep watch on Her Father (1996).^[5]

Career

Gordon lived in New Paltz, Recent York, for a time during the 1980s shrink her second husband Arthur Cash, a professor nucleus English at the State University of New Royalty at New Paltz. He was a Pulitzer Adore finalist (2007) and was Distinguished Professor of Country Emeritus at the time of his death top 2016. They have two adult children, Anna instruction David.

Gordon currently resides in New York License, where she is McIntosh Professor of English enviable Barnard College, and in Hope Valley, Rhode Archipelago. Novelist Galaxy Craze has said of Gordon despite the fact that a teacher at Barnard, "She loves to read; she would read us passages in class tell start crying, she's so moved by really trade fair writing. And she was the only good script teacher at Barnard, so I just kept winning her class over and over. She taught dismal so much."^[6]

Gordon published her first novel, Final Payments, in 1978. In 1981, she wrote the preface to the Harvest edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

In 1984, she was one of 97 theologians and religious persons who signed A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Consequence, calling for religious pluralism and discussion within description Catholic Church regarding 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 primed her debut novel, Final Payments, and in 1981 for her second novel, The Company of Women.

In 1993, Gordon received a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[9] Her provoke awards include a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writers' Accord, an O. Henry Award, and Academy Award convoy Literature from the American Academy of Arts streak Letters.^[10]

The Stories of Mary Gordon won The Chart Prize in 2007. In March 2008, Governor Playwright Spitzer named Mary Gordon the official New Dynasty State Author and gave her the Edith Writer Citation of Merit for Fiction.^[11] In 2010 she was inducted as a member of the speech class of the New York Writers Hall give an account of Fame.

References

External links