Hortense Calisher - Biography

Hortense Calisher (December 20, 1911 – January 13, 2009) was an American writer of fiction.

Biography

Personal life

Born in New York City, New York, and a graduate of Hunter College High School (1928) and Barnard College (1932), Calisher was the daughter of a young German Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia whose family she described as "volcanic to meditative to fruitfully dull and bound to produce someone interested in character, society, and time".

Writing style

Calisher 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 considered Calisher a type of neo-realist and often both condemned and praised for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. Her writing was at odds with the prevailing minimalism typical of fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s that employed a spartan, non-romantic style without undue expressionism.

Honors and awards

A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award (for "The Night Club in the Woods") and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (for The Bobby Soxer), and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

Death

Calisher died at the age of 97 on January 13, 2009, in Manhattan. She was survived by her husband, Curtis Harnack, and her son from her previous marriage, Peter Heffelfinger. Calisher was predeceased by her daughter, Bennet Heffelfinger.

Bibliography

Fiction

• In the Absence of Angels (1951)
• False Entry (1961)
• Tale 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)
• The Novellas of Hortense Calisher (1997)
• Sunday Jews (2003)

Non-fiction

• Herself (autobiography, 1972)
• Tattoo for a Slave (memoir, 2004)

External links

• Hortense Calisher's website
• Joyce Carol Oates on Hortense Calisher