Rose Ellen Currie (1930 – January 3, 2012) was a writer and advertising executive known for her first novel, ''Available Light''.
Currie was born in
Long Island, New York
Long Island is a densely populated island in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of New York, part of the New York metropolitan area. With over 8 million people, Long Island is the most populous island in the United States and the 18th ...
. Her father was an electrician and her mother was Scottish.
As a young woman she corresponded with
J. D. Salinger who told her that her stories "reek of talent."
Currie graduated from
Adelphi University.
She worked as a copywriter and later vice president for the
J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. While doing graduate work at
Columbia University, she wrote several short stories, primarily humorous, about Irish Americans, which were published in
The New Yorker and selected for two O. Henry collections.
The first novel she wrote was left in a taxicab and never recovered.
Her first published novel, ''Available Light'', was a magical realist look at a romance gone bad in contemporary New York which came out in 1986.
The
New York Times said that it "takes risks and its sound is original," while the
Chicago Tribune called it "wildly funny, weirdly accomplished and compulsively quotable."
She received a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in 1987.
Her second published work, a collection of "wonderful short stories" according to the ''New York Times,'' was ''Moses Supposes.'' It came out in 1994 and was a
National Book Award finalist.
Both books were republished by
Mariner Books in 2006.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Currie, Ellen
1930 births
2012 deaths
American women writers
Writers from New York (state)
21st-century American women