American short story writer, poet, and lifelong political activist whose three slim collections — The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day (1985) — assembled across nearly forty years one of the most distinctive bodies of short fiction in American literature. Paley was born in the Bronx in 1922, the daughter of Russian Jewish socialist immigrants who had been imprisoned by the Tsar and who arrived in New York with their politics intact, and the voice she eventually found on the page — Yiddish-cadenced, comic, ethically alert, structurally unconventional — was the voice of the apartment-house kitchens and playgrounds and PTA meetings of mid-century New York Jewish women, raised to literary art without ever leaving its origins.
She studied briefly with W.H. Auden at the New School in the late 1930s, who told her, gently, that her early poems leaned too heavily on borrowed poetic diction; she should write the way her people actually spoke. The lesson took twenty years to land. The stories that resulted, when they came, abandoned conventional plot for accumulated talk, fragmented chronology, and a relationship between narrator and characters in which the writer is a participant in the neighborhood she is writing about, not its anthropologist. Faith Darwin, the recurring narrator across the second and third collections, is recognizably though not strictly Paley herself: divorced, raising two children in the Village, talking to her father in the nursing home, organizing against the war.
Paley's politics and her writing were not separable activities. She was a draft-card-burning antiwar organizer through the Vietnam years (jailed several times), a delegate to North Vietnam in 1969 to negotiate the release of American prisoners of war, a founding member of the Greenwich Village Peace Center, an anti-nuclear and feminist activist into her eighties. She wrote slowly because she was busy doing other things, and because she did not believe writing was the most important of the things one might do — a position that, taken seriously, also shaped what the writing could be. Collected Stories (1994) was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; she was named the first official New York State Author in 1986 and Vermont State Poet in 2003.