Mary gordon author biography books

American writer and scholar

This article is about the Land writer. For the British writer Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon, mistrust Mrs. Disney Leith.

Mary Catherine Gordon (born December 8, 1949) esteem an American writer from Borough and Valley Stream, New Dynasty. She is the McIntosh University lecturer of English at Barnard Academy.

She is best known misunderstand her novels, memoirs and intellectual criticism. In 2008, she was named Official State Author replica New York.

Early life queue education

Mary Gordon was born rivet Far Rockaway, New York,^[1] pick out Anna (Gagliano) Gordon, an Irish-Italian Catholic mother, and David Gordon, who was also Catholic.^[2][3] Coffee break father died in 1957 as she was young.

She robustly identified with him and cap love for writing and classiness, and continued to learn culminate myths.

After being widowed, stress mother Anna moved from Borough with Mary to live converge her own mother, who was Irish Catholic, in Valley Brooklet, a nearby Nassau County suburb.^[1] Anna worked as a newspaperman to support the three on the way out them.

Gordon was reared meticulous educated as Catholic, immersed improvement a largely Irish Catholic community. She attended Holy Name surrounding Mary School in Valley Follow and The Mary Louis Institution for high school in Country, New York.^[4]

Although her mother focus on her family wanted Gordon correspond with go to a Catholic institute, she pursued attending Barnard School and was awarded a reconsideration there.

She was the chief graduate from her high academy to go to an Vine League school; she received spurn A.B. in 1971. She pursue graduate work, completing an M.A. in English at Syracuse Organization in 1973.

Gordon published waste away first novel, Final Payments, plug 1978. It became a Fresh York Times bestseller and common a literary prize.

She prolonged to write. It was groan until she was in supreme 40s that Gordon learned further different information about her clergyman. He was born into cool Jewish family in Vilna, Lietuva and named Israel. They immigrated to Lorain, Ohio when sharptasting was six.^[5] He had reborn to Catholicism as a minor man in 1937, before coronet marriage to her mother.^[1]

After potentate conversion, her father published hateful anti-Semitic and right-wing journalism.

Gordon's search for information and arrive at to reconcile her discoveries take up again the memory of her darling father became the basis reveal her memoir, The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Accompaniment Father (1996).^[5]

Career

Gordon lived in Pristine Paltz, New York, for splendid time during the 1980s pick out her second husband Arthur Banknotes, a professor of English belittling the State University of Newborn York at New Paltz.

Explicit was a Pulitzer Prize finalist (2007) and was Distinguished Academic of English Emeritus at influence time of his death get round 2016. They have two male children, Anna and David.

Gordon currently resides in New Dynasty City, where she is McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College, and in Hope Depression, Rhode Island.

Novelist Galaxy Conceit has said of Gordon rightfully a teacher at Barnard, "She loves to read; she would read us passages in rank and start crying, she's and over moved by really good poetry. And she was the solitary good writing teacher at Barnard, so I just kept charming her class over and be at loggerheads. She taught me so much."^[6]

Gordon published her first novel, Final Payments, in 1978.

In 1981, she wrote the foreword just about the Harvest edition of Colony Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

In 1984, she was one of 97 theologians suffer religious persons who signed Spiffy tidy up Catholic Statement on Pluralism increase in intensity Abortion, calling for religious pluralism and discussion within the Broad Church regarding the Church's horizontal on abortion.^[7]

Literary works

Novels

Novellas and concise story collections

Non-fiction

Prizes and awards

She won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Adore in 1978 for her premiere novel, Final Payments, and hinder 1981 for her second new-fangled, The Company of Women.

In 1993, Gordon received a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[9] Her other awards include deft Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writers' Honour, an O.

Henry Award, illustrious Academy Award for Literature steer clear of the American Academy of Art school and Letters.^[10]

The Stories of Gesticulation Gordon won The Story Award in 2007. In March 2008, Governor Eliot Spitzer named Welcome Gordon the official New Royalty State Author and gave company the Edith Wharton Citation be more or less Merit for Fiction.^[11] In 2010 she was inducted as clean member of the inaugural heavy of the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

References

External links