Hortense Calisher (December 20, 1911 – January 13, 2009) was an American writer of fiction and the second female president of the

American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...

Biography

Personal life

Born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, and a graduate of

Hunter College High School Hunter College High School is a secondary school located in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is administered by Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Hunter is publicly funded, and there i ...

(1928) and

Barnard College Barnard College of Columbia University is a private women's liberal arts college in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1889 by a group of women led by young student activist Annie Nathan Meyer, who petitioned Columbia ...

(1932), Calisher was the daughter of a young German Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...

whose family she described as "volcanic to meditative to fruitfully dull and bound to produce someone interested in character, society, and time". In 1972, she was a part of the ''Ms''. magazine campaign: “We Have Had Abortions.” The campaign called for an end to "archaic laws" limiting reproductive freedom and encouraged women to share their stories and take action.

Writing style

Calisher involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with

Eudora Welty Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel ''The Optimist's Daughter'' won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numero ...

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

Jane Austen Jane Austen (; 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots of ...

, and

Henry James Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...

. Critics generally considered Calisher a type of neo-realist and often both condemned and praised her for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. Her writing was at odds with the prevailing

minimalism In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...

typical of fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s that employed a spartan, nonromantic style without undue

expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

. ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' opined that her "unpredictable turns of phrase, intellectually challenging fictional situations and complex plots captivated and puzzled readers for a half-century. Failure and isolation were themes that ran through her 23 novels and short-story collections: failure of love, marriage, communication, identity. She explored the isolation within families that cannot be avoided yet cannot be faced, isolation imposed by wounds inflicted even in the happiest of households, wounds that shape events for generations. But her peers seemed most intrigued by her distinctive way of telling a story, her filigreed sentences and bold stylistic excursions... Throughout her career as a novelist, opinion tended to split evenly among critics who found her prose style and approach to narrative better suited to short stories nd those whowere mesmerized by her idiosyncratic language and imaginative daring."

Honors and awards

Calisher became the second female president of the

in 1987. From 1986 to 1987 she was president of

PEN America PEN America (formerly PEN American Center), founded in 1922 and headquartered in New York City, is a nonprofit organization that works to defend and celebrate free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of litera ...

, the writers' association. She was a finalist for the

National Book Award The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The Nat ...

three times, won

O. Henry Awards The O. Henry Award is an annual American award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American short-story writer O. Henry. The ''PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories'' is an annual collection of the year's twenty best ...

(for "The Night Club in the Woods" and other works) and the 1986

Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize The Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize is a literary award presented annually for the "best book-length work of prose fiction" by an American woman. The award has been given by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Depar ...

(for ''The Bobby Soxer''), and was awarded

Guggenheim Fellowships 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 1952 and 1955. She was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 1997.

Death

Calisher died on January 13, 2009, aged 97, in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

.Noble, Holcomb B. January 15, 2009
"Hortense Calisher, Author, Dies at 97"
''

''; accessed January 1, 2017. She was survived by her husband, Curtis Harnack, and her son, Peter Heffelfinger, from her first marriage to Heaton Bennet Heffelfinger. Calisher was predeceased by her daughter, Bennet Heffelfinger.

Bibliography

Fiction

*''In the Absence of Angels'' (short stories 1951) *''False Entry'' (novel 1961) *''Tale for the Mirror'' (novella and short stories 1962) *''Textures of Life'' (novel 1963) *''Extreme Magic'' (novella and short stories 1964) *''Journal from Ellipsia'' (novel 1965) *''The Railway Police and The Last Trolley Ride'' (novellas 1966) *''The New Yorkers'' (novel 1969) *''Queenie'' (novel 1971) *''Standard Dreaming'' (novel 1972) *''Eagle Eye'' (novel 1973) *''The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher'' (1975, revised 1984) *''On Keeping Women'' (novel 1977) *''Mysteries of Motion'' (novel 1983) *''Saratoga, Hot'' (novella and short stories 1985) *''The Bobby-Soxer'' (novel 1986) *''Age'' (novel 1987) *''The Small Bang'' (novel under the pseudonym of Jack Fenno 1992) *''In the Palace of the Movie King'' (novel 1993) *''In the Slammer with Carol Smith'' (novel 1997) *''The Novellas of Hortense Calisher'' (1997) *''Sunday Jews'' (novel 2003)

Non-fiction

*''Herself'' (

autobiography An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life. It is a form of biography. Definition The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English peri ...

, 1972) *''Kissing Cousins: A Memory'' (

memoir A memoir (; , ) is any nonfiction narrative writing based in the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. While memoir has historically been defined as a subcategory of biography or autobi ...

, 1988) *''Tattoo for a Slave'' (

, 2004)

References

External links

Joyce Carol Oates on Hortense Calisher
*Snodgrass, Kathleen
"Hortense Calisher"
Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia * {{DEFAULTSORT:Calisher, Hortense 1911 births 2009 deaths 20th-century American novelists American women short story writers Barnard College alumni Hunter College High School alumni Jewish women writers Jewish American novelists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Writers from Manhattan 21st-century American novelists American women novelists 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women writers 20th-century American short story writers 21st-century American short story writers Novelists from New York (state) Presidents of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 20th-century American Jews 21st-century American Jews