Grace Paley, had a passion for poetry and politics, dies at 84

NEW YORK. — Poet and short-story writer Grace Paley, 84, a literary eminence and old-fashioned rebel who described herself as a "combative pacifist," died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She had breast cancer.

"She was a great writer," said Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which is about to publish a book of new Paley poetry. "Her sense of the vernacular of the particular world she came from was just wonderful. She was able to capture the humor and pathos in a certain New York voice."

A published writer since the 1950s, Mrs. Paley released only a handful of books over the next 50-plus years, mostly short stories and poems. Among her story collections are "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," in 1974, and "Later the Same Day," in 1985.

One noted admirer, novelist Philip Roth, said her stories offered "an understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike."

Writing was a passion but not a compulsion. Her fiction, although highly praised, competed for time with work, activism, family and friends.

A longtime New Yorker, she moved to Vermont in 1988 after having spent summers there. She was named state poet laureate in early 2003.

In many ways, Mrs. Paley wasn't a typical American writer. Her characters did not suffer "identity crises." Instead of living on the road, they stayed home, in Greenwich Village. They discussed politics, dared to take sides and belonged to clubs.

"People talk of alienation and so forth," she said in a 1994 interview. "I don't feel that. I feel angry at certain things, but I don't feel alienated from it."

Born Grace Goodside in New York in 1922, she was one of three children of Russian Jews. Her family spoke English, Russian and Yiddish, but politics proved the universal language. Her parents had opposed the czar in Russia and were supporters of the New Deal. The bitterest neighborhood feuds were between Trotskyites and Stalinists.

"I thought being Jewish meant you were a socialist," Paley said. "Everyone on my block was a socialist or a communist. ... People would have serious, insane arguments, and it was nice."

She started writing poems early and continued to as she married a movie cameraman, Jess Paley, had two children, worked part time as a typist and became involved in community affairs around Greenwich Village. The Paleys later divorced.

Mrs. Paley began writing prose in the 1950s. Although many of her pieces were rejected by magazines, an editor at Doubleday learned of her work and her first collection, "The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love," was published in 1959.

Like longtime neighbors, Mrs. Paley's characters become familiar faces, especially the compassionate, recurring character Faith Darwin. It was typical of Mrs. Paley that she did not look upon Faith as an alter ego but as someone who might have been a "good, close pal."

Mrs. Paley was a self-described "combative pacifist" who joined the War Resisters League in the '60s and visited Hanoi on a peace mission. She was arrested in 1978 during an anti-nuclear protest on the White House lawn and for years could be found every Saturday passing out protest leaflets on a street corner near her New York apartment.

"I happened to like the '60s a lot. I thought great things were happening then, and I was glad my children were part of that generation," she said.

Mrs. Paley married playwright Robert Nichols in 1972. In the late 1990s, they formed Glad Day Books, which publishes political fiction and nonfiction.

In addition to Nichols, Mrs. Paley is survived by a son, a daughter, three stepchildren and seven grandchildren.

Material from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.