Contemporary Women's Writing Advance Access originally published online on September 8, 2009
Contemporary Women's Writing 2009 3(2):135-142; doi:10.1093/cww/vpp019
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Starting Out in the Fifties: Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and the Making of a Literary Career
The Graduate Center, CUNY nmiller@gc.cuny.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the spring of 1959 Grace Paley and Philip Roth both published first short story collections: The Little Disturbances of Man and Goodbye, Columbus. The two volumes were well received and often compared. Rollene Saal in the Saturday Review, for instance, under the rubric "Four New Faces in Fiction," introduced the authors through brief profiles designed to entice the audience of the distinctly middle-brow weekly's faithful, who, like my mother, a great reader, might have also subscribed to The New Yorker. "Grace Paley's success should encourage every harassed housewife who harbors writing ambitions," the Saturday Review bio begins, framing the literary debut in the language of fifties domestic culture: Mrs. Paley "has a husband, two children under ten, and a