Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction, children's books and nonfiction.
Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she joined the English department at Cornell University in 1970, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others. Her first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), is a story of romance and deception among the faculty of a snowbound New England college. It won favorable reviews and established her as a keen observer of love in academia. It was followed by the well-received The Nowhere City (1966) and The War Between the Tates (1974). In 1984, she published Foreign Affairs, her best-known novel, which traces the erotic entanglements of two American professors in England. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Her most recent novel is The Last Resort (1998). In addition to her novels, Lurie’s interest in children’s literature led to three collections of folk tales and two critical studies of the genre.
Lurie officially retired from Cornell in 1998, but continued to teach and write. In 2012, she was awarded a two-year term as the official author of the state of New York.
Lurie lived in Ithaca, New York, and was married to the writer Edward Hower. She was previously married to author Jonathan Peale Bishop had three sons from this marriage.
Lurie died under hospice care in Ithaca, New York on December 3, 2020, at age 94.
edited with information from Wikipedia.
“Brian knows the affair is wrong. He's known from the moment Wendy first undressed in his office. But with her hot, wet tongue in his ear, and her taut, pink nipples straining against his starched white shirt, and with Mick Jagger's strident voice squawking about satisfaction on the tiny transistor radio, Brian's body refuses to obey.Instead of shoving Wendy out the door, he shoves her onto the unmade bed.”
“...you can't write well with only the nice parts of your character, and only about nice things. And I don't want even to try anymore. I want to use everything, including hate and envy and lust and fear.”
“There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.”
“The great subversive works of children's literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.”