She was born in Chicago and now teaches at the Department of English,
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. She visits England every summer.
She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1965 and won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1985 for "Foreign Affairs."
Well known for her adult novels. Excerpt from "Contemporary Novelists,
7th ed. St. James Press": "All her novels depict characters who are
subject to rapid, and often unexpected, changes which precipitate
crises in previous and usually smoothly organized existences. Rational
academics join crazy religious sects, careful WASP wives have affairs
with unsuitable musicians and artists, besuited historians turn
beatnik, while refined East Coast ladies on vacation in London have
passionate flings with waste-disposal engineers from Tulsa. Like fellow
campus chroniclers David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, Lurie obviously
enjoys the narrative strategy of placing her characters in unfamiliar
surroundings, testing their previous relationships and assumptions to
the limit."
Excerpt from "Contemporary Authors": "I can think of no other writer
who so thoroughly embodies the [Henry] Jamesian spirit as Alison
Lurie," commented Edmund White in the New York Times Book Review. "Like
him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her
books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects."
New Statesman correspondent Amada Craig called Lurie "the only living
writer to hold a candle to Jane Austen," an artist whose "irony is
tempered by a deeper humanity."
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1069735,00.html
(biographical article - lots about her work in children's literature!)
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/al28/html/childrens.html
(brief juvenile-book descriptions of hers)
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/al28/html/non_ficton.html
(more of same)
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/al28/index.html
(homepage)
http://wiredforbooks.org/alisonlurie/
(audio interview)
http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/truth_and_consequences.html
(print interview)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/12/specials/lurie.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
(articles by and about her - juvenile topics are at the bottom)
http://www.nybooks.com/authors/49
(book reviews by and about her for the "New York Review of Books" -
subjects include Baum, de Brunhoff, Gorey, Rowling, C.S. Lewis, Alcott,
H.C. Andersen, Tove Jansson, Seuss, and Nesbit.)
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,6000,...6323,00
("The Guardian" article on the Narnia Chronicles****)
http://imdb.com/name/nm0527081/
(filmography - all adult novels)
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22alison+lurie%22&ndsp=20&svnum=10&...en&lr=&
(photos & book covers - 11 pages worth!)
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=alison+lurie
(a few recent articles, including her comments on "Babar")
Juvenile books:
The Heavenly Zoo: Legends and Tales of the Stars. 1979.
Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales. 1980.
Fabulous Beasts. 1981.
Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature. 1990 ; as
Not in Front of the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature, 1991.
Cap o'Rushes. 1991.
The Black Geese: A Baba Yaga Story From Russia (reteller), illustrated
by Jessica Souhami. 1999.
Other
Editor, The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales. 1993.
Preface to: American Fairy Tales: From Rip Van Winkle to the Rootabaga
Stories (Paperback) by Neil Philip, 1998.
Editor, The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. 1999.
Boys and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry
Potter, Penguin, 2003.
Lenona.
****Personally, I can't agree with her about Susan - to me, at least,
her downfall was Lewis' way of humbly admitting that Susan was always a
sexist embarrassment as a character, and therefore he carried her to
her logical extreme as a useless stereotype. She was never, IIRC,
"wise," as Lurie says. Besides, while Peter doesn't make this clear
when he refers to her, she has not necessarily fallen permanently from
Aslan's grace - she simply wasn't in the train at the time. Also, as
Polly says, she really never was interested in growing up in a tangible
way - certainly not compared to Polly or even Lucy, so for Lewis to put
her in the train and have her "come along" would have made her nothing
but an ornamental burden in the end, whereas Lewis' ending removes her
as an embarrassment.
Oh, and I don't really remember this....."(Calormene) women cannot
read or write"......*I* always assumed that Aravis asked the secretary
to write the letter just because he might be better at forging certain
kinds of penmanship and other formalities - and besides, he's her
servant. But maybe I'm wrong, just as it never occurred to me that
polygamy was a Calormene tradition even after the Tisroc mentions that
he has "eighteen other sons."
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