Monthly Archives: March 2024

“Hortense Calisher: (1911-2009) American novelist and short-story writer. Calisher’s first, partly autobiographical, stories appeared in The New Yorker. Many of her early stories featured Hester Elkin and her large Jewish family living in New York City. Her most frequently anthologized story, ‘In Greenwich, There Are Many Gravelled Walks’ (1951), focuses on a man, his loneliness, and a final promise of companionship. The full range of her short fiction is contained in Collected Stories (1975). Apart from the facts that she is an acknowledged master of style and that her work offers intricately drawn insights into her characters, Calisher’s writing defies easy classification. Characters in her first novel, False Entry (1961), reappear in an entirely different context in The New Yorkers (1969). Both Journal from Ellipsia (1965) and Queenie (1971) contain spoofs of American sexual mores, the former by presenting alternatives from another planet, the latter through the eyes of an ‘old-fashioned girl.’ Other novels include Texture of Life (1963), On Keeping Women (1977), and In the Palace of the Movie King (1993). In 1988, Calisher published a volume of memoirs, Kissing Cousins.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.