Alison Lurie, author of ‘Foreign Affairs’ and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, dies

New York: Alison Lurie, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose satirical and cerebral tales of affection and academia included the marital saga ‘The War Between the Tates’ and the comedy of Americans overseas ‘Foreign Affairs’, died Thursday at age 94.

Lurie, a professor emerita at Cornell University, died of pure causes, in response to her husband and associate, Edward Hower.

Praised by The New York Times as one of many nation’s “most able and witty novelists”, Lurie broke via commercially in 1974 with ‘The War Between the Tates’ and obtained her highest approval for ‘Foreign Affairs’,winner of the 1985 Pulitzer. Set in London, Lurie’s novel was consciously primarily based on old school narratives of manners and customs, with one character imagining himself trapped in a Henry James story.

The protagonists have been Corinth University professor Virginia “Vinnie” Martin, an Anglophile and middle-aged scholar of kids’s literature so self-contained that her closest companion is an invisible canine, and her wayward younger colleague, Fred Turner, who takes up with the impulsive British actress Rosemary Radley as his marriage falls aside again residence.

“Before he met Rosemary, Fred didn’t really exist for anyone here except a few other academic ghosts”, Lurie wrote. “Now the city is alive for him and he alive in it. Everything pulses with meaning, with history and possibility, and Rosemary most of all. When he is with her he feels he holds all of England, the best of England, in his arms.”

Lurie’s novel was tailored right into a 1993 tv film starring Joanne Woodward as Vinnie and Eric Stoltz as Fred. ‘The War Between the Tates’ grew to become a 1977 TV manufacturing that includes Elizabeth Ashley and Richard Crenna.

Academics and artists have been typically featured in her work, which mixed storytelling with social and mental commentary. Her first ebook, ‘Love and Friendship’, centered on a professor’s spouse in New England who has an intense affair with a college musician. In ‘The War Between the Tates’, a Corinth professor’s adultery upends his marriage and scatters husband and spouse into the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s.

Her different books included the novels ‘The Last Resort’ and ‘Real People’, the nonfiction works ‘The Language of Clothes’ and ‘The Language of Architecture’ and ‘Familiar Spirits’, a memoir about her friendship with the prize-winning poet James Merrill and his companion David Jackson. Her most up-to-date novel, ‘Truth and Consequences’, got here out in 2005. Her final revealed ebook, the literary essay assortment ‘Words and Worlds’, was launched in 2019.

In her fiction, Lurie drew brazenly from her personal life. Corinth was an Ivy League faculty that carefully approximated Cornell and she or he shared Vinnie’s love for England and experience in kids’s literature, modifying such compilations as ‘The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales’ and ‘The Heavenly Zoo’. She wrote about Vietnam War protests, and took part in them. In 1985, she was arrested throughout a rally at Cornell that referred to as on the varsity to dump its investments in corporations doing enterprise with South Africa’s racist authorities.

Married in 1948 to Jonathan Bishop, a tutorial and son of the poet John Bishop Peale, she separated from him across the time. ‘The War Between the Tates’ was revealed and later married Hower, an creator and Cornell literature professor. She had three sons with Bishop.

Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, Lurie was the kid of liberal, educated dad and mom and grew up studying Jane Austen and different British authors as a result of there “were not many models for the American woman novelist, except for the Southern school”, she instructed The Associated Press in 1985. She studied historical past and politics at Radcliffe College and spent a lot of the 1950s elevating her kids, writing tales and poems and dealing with the Poets’ Theater, the place members included Merrill and John Ashbery.

She and Bishop lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles, each of which grew to become settings for her fiction, earlier than shifting to Ithaca, New York within the early 1960s. ‘Love and Friendship’ got here out in 1962 and acquired proper to a favourite theme.

“The day on which Emily Stockwell Turner fell out of love with her husband”, Lurie wrote within the ebook’s opening sentence, “began much like other days”.