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After a spell as a reader for the New York office of the Oxford University Press, she married Jonathan Bishop, an academic, in 1948 and followed his fledgling career, moving to Harvard, Amherst College and later UCLA before they settled at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, in 1961. She was born in Chicago, the elder daughter of socialist parents, Bernice (nee Stewart), a journalist, and Harry Lurie, a sociologist, grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1946. Always keen to reflect on the zeitgeist (ecology in The Last Resort, new age sects in the 1967 novel Imaginary Friends), Lurie is nothing if not scrupulously fair. Thus the caricatured lesbians of The Truth About Lorin Jones are answered by the sympathetic portrayal of Lee and Jenny in The Last Resort. Each critique is balanced by a more positive perception, however, either within one novel or between novels. Taking the Vietnam war as a metaphor for marital crisis, this is one of her funniest novels, if also her bleakest, with its details of lawyers who privately decide whose divorce to delay on the grounds of likely reconciliation and whose to speed up there is also its devastating closing comment on the Tates: “They will forget that they are ugly, foolish, guilty and dying.”Įlsewhere, political correctness, feminist dogma and sociology all come under the dissecting knife. Gore Vidal dubbed her “the Queen Herod of modern fiction” (a description Lurie herself disliked) for her portrayal of the Tates’ revolting adolescent children in The War Between the Tates but the most shocking moment in the book is when the narrator comments, of the put-upon wife and mother Erica: “The fact that she hates her own children is her darkest, most carefully guarded secret.” Often compared to the work of Jane Austen, Lurie’s satires of marriage and manners have a savage quality. She began to write, she said, to amuse herself and other people, but described her inspiration as the desire to laugh at things. But his habit of revealing the self-delusion of others suggests that he functions as her alter ego, always ready with a pin to prick pretensions, much as Lurie was herself.
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She has three grown sons and three grandchildren.Lurie accounted for his nearly ubiquitous presence by explaining that Zimmern was the hero of her first, rejected novel and so, sorry that he could not have a book of his own, she brought him back in a series of supporting roles. Lurie lives in Ithaca, New York, and is married to the writer Edward Hower. In 2012, she was awarded a two-year term as the official author of the state of New York. Lurie officially retired from Cornell in 1998, but continues to teach and write. In addition to her novels, Lurie’s interest in children’s literature led to three collections of folk tales and two critical studies of the genre. Her most recent novel is The Last Resort (1998). In 1984, she published Foreign Affairs, her best-known novel, which traces the erotic entanglements of two American professors in England. It was followed by the well-received The Nowhere City (1966) and The War Between the Tates (1974). It won favorable reviews and established her as a keen observer of love in academia.
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Her first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), is a story of romance and deception among the faculty of a snowbound New England college. Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she joined the English department at Cornell University in 1970, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others. 1926) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction.