Alison Lurie papers

Alison Stewart Lurie was born on September 3, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in White Plains, New York. Her father Harry Lawrence Lurie was a sociologist and her mother Bernice “Bun” Lurie (née Stewart) was a journalist and book critic. Lurie attended Cherry Lawn School, a boarding school in Darien, Connecticut, and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature. Lurie met literary scholar Jonathan Peale Bishop while attending Radcliffe College and they married in 1948. Bishop later taught at Amherst College and Cornell University and Lurie moved alongside him. They had three sons and divorced in 1984. She then married writer Edward Hower. She spent part of her time in London, part in Ithaca, and part in Key West, Florida.

Lurie published her first novel, Love and Friendship, in 1962, going on to publish numerous other novels, including Imaginary Friends (1967), The War Between the Tates, Real People (1969), and Only Children (1979). In 1985, she won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for her novel Foreign Affairs (1984). She has also written several nonfiction books including the critical study Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children’s Literature (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2003), The Language of Clothes (1981) examines the meaning of fashion, and Familiar Spirits (2001), a memoir of poet James Merrill and his partner David Jackson.

In 1970, Lurie began to teach in the English department at Cornell, where she taught children’s literature, folklore, and writing. In 1976, she was named the F.J. Whiton Professor of American Literature at Cornell and attained tenure in 1979. Upon retirement in 1998, she was named professor emerita. Lurie continued teaching and writing post-retirement, publishing the novel The Last Resort the same year. In 2012, she was named a two-year term as the official author of the state of New York. Lurie died from natural causes while under hospice care in Ithaca, New York, on December 3, 2020, at the age of 94.