Profile of Alison Lurie on Famous Like Me

Alison Lurie (born September 3, 1926) is an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she has also written numerous non-fiction books.

Her first novel was Love and Friendship (1962), followed by The Nowhere City in 1965 (about Los Angeles, California, where Lurie lived from 1957 to 1961). Two novels set in New England appeared in 1967 and 1969: Imaginary Friends and Real People, respectively. Imaginary Friends, about a group of people who believe they are communicating with extraterrestrials, was made into a Thames Television series in 1987. In 1974, she released The War Between the Tates, set in a Cornell-like "Corinth University," and this was adapted to a television movie for NBC. Only Children came out in 1979, and it is set in the New England of the 1930s.

Her most famous book, Foreign Affairs, concerns American academics in England, and it was made into a television film. The 1989 The Truth About Lorin Jones is set in Key West, Florida and concerns the efforts of a biographer.

In 2001 Lurie published a memoir, Familiar Spirits, recounting a decades-long friendship with poet James Merrill (1926–1995) and his partner David Jackson (1922–2001). Lurie credits Merrill and Jackson for encouraging her writing in the 1950s, a decade during which she suffered several rejections from publishers.

Alison Lurie has also been very active as an editor of children's literature. She was co-editor of the Garland Library of Children's Classics (73 vol.). She has taught literature, folklore, and writing at Cornell University since 1970 and is married to the writer Edward Hower.

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