Writer Grace Paley Dies at 84

'Neurotically Anti-Authoritarian' Activist and Author Gave Voice to Women of Native Bronx

By Polly Davis Doig, Newser Staff

Posted Aug 23, 2007 6:07 PM CDT

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Writer Grace Paley Dies at 84 — Author Grace Paley sits beside a pile of books in her home in Thetford, Vt., April 9, 2003. Paley, a literary eminence and old-fashioned rebel who described herself as a "combative pacifist," has died. She was 84. Paley, who had battled breast cancer, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt.,... (Associated Press)

Acclaimed writer and activist Grace Paley, who in only three collections of short stories gave earthy voice to the interior life of the Bronx Everywoman, died yesterday at age 84 in her Vermont home, the Los Angeles Times reports. Paley—whose sensibility admirer Philip Roth called "splendidly comic and unladylike"—suffered from breast cancer.

Her three collections, from 1959 to 1985, won her critical acclaim and the prestigious Rea Award for short-story writing. But Paley, known as a passionate activist for causes ranging from the Vietnam War to feminism to the Iraq War, was perhaps less prolific for those efforts—a diversity of experience she embraced in a June interview, saying, “It’s not as if anybody is one thing.” (More obituary stories.)

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