Lurie, Alison (1926-2020), an American author, won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel Foreign Affairs (1984). Lurie taught at Cornell University, and her prize-winning novel, like most of her fiction, has an academic background. Lurie’s witty and satirical stories often deal with educated middle-class men and women. Many of the characters experience problems with their marriages, and adultery often appears in her novels.
In Foreign Affairs, two American professors of English spend a semester in London and stumble into various romantic entanglements. Perhaps Lurie’s most popular novel is The War Between the Tates (1974). The story is set on a college campus and describes the breakdown of a marriage between a professor and his wife. Lurie’s other novels include Love and Friendship (1962), The Nowhere City (1965), Imaginary Friends (1967), Real People (1969), Only Children (1979), The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988), The Last Resort (1998), and Truth and Consequences (2005).
Alison Stewart Lurie was born on Sept. 3, 1926, in Chicago. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature. She began her teaching career as a lecturer at Cornell in 1969, retiring in 1998. Lurie also wrote several children’s books and edited The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (1993). Her essays on children’s literature were collected in Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2003). A collection of nine modern ghost stories was published as Women and Ghosts (1994). Lurie died on Dec. 3, 2020.
