Hortense Calisher
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hortense Calisher (born New York City December 20, 1911) is an American writer of fiction.
A graduate of Barnard College (1932), she was the daughter of a young German immigrant and an older father from a Southern family she described as "volcanic to meditative to fruitfully dull, and bound to produce someone interested in character, society, and time" (Tattoo for a Slave), she has involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Critics generally consider Calisher a type of neo-realist, and often she is both condemned and praised for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. Calisher was definitely at odds with the prevailing writing style of minimalism that characterized fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s and that emphasized a sparse, non-romantic style with no room for expressionism or romanticism. As an anti-minimalist, she is still admired for her elliptical style in which more is hinted at than stated, and she is also praised as a social realist and critic in the vein of Honore Balzac and Edith Wharton.
Among her books are In the Absence of Angels (1951); False Entry (1961); Tales for the Mirror (1962), Textures of Life, (1963), Extreme Magic (1964), Journey from Ellipsia (1966), The Railway Police, and The Last Trolley Ride (1966), The New Yorkers (1970), Standard Dreaming (1972), Eagle Eye (1973), Queenie (1973), The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher 1975), On Keeping Women (1977), Mysteries of Motion (1983), Saratoga Hot (1985), The Bobby-Soxer (1986), Age (1987), Kissing Cousins: A Memory (1988), The Small Bang (under the pseudonym of Jack Fenno) (1992), In the Palace of the Movie King (1993), In the Slammer with Carol Smith (1997), Sunday Jews (2003), and Tattoo for a Slave (2004).
Her collected novellas were published in 1997. Her autobiography, Herself, was published in 1972.
A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she has been a National Book Award finalist three times and has won an O. Henry Award (for "The Night Club in the Woods") as well as being awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955 [1]. She lives in New York City.
