Mary Gordon (writer)

Mary Gordon

Mary Catherine Gordon (born December 8, 1949) is an American writer and is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is best known for her novels, memoirs and literary criticism. They constitute an important contribution to Irish-American literature.

Biography

Mary Gordon was born in Far Rockaway, New York, to Anna Gagliano Gordon, an Italian-Irish Catholic mother, and David Gordon, a Jewish father who converted to Catholicism.^[1] While growing up, she attended Holy Name of Mary School in Valley Stream and for high school attended The Mary Louis Academy in Jamaica, N.Y.. She is Catholic.^[2]

She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1971, and her M.A. from Syracuse University in 1973. Gordon lived in New Paltz, New York for a time during the 1980s. She and her husband, Arthur Cash, live in New York City and Hope Valley, Rhode Island. They have two adult children, Anna and David. Gordon is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. Cash is retired.

In 1981, she wrote the foreword to the Harvest edition of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." In 1984 she was one of 97 theologians and religious persons who signed A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion, calling for religious pluralism and discussion within the Catholic Church regarding the Church's position on abortion.^[3]

Novelist Galaxy Craze has said of Gordon, "She loves to read; she would read us passages in class and start crying, she's so moved by really good writing. And she was the only good writing teacher at Barnard, so I just kept taking her class over and over. She taught me so much." ^[4]

Circling My Mother: A Memoir (2007) marked her return to nonfiction after two works of fiction.

In 2009 she published a book called Reading Jesus. It uses Gordon's literary training to read the Gospels.

In 2011, she published The Love of My Youth.

Literary works

Novels

• Final Payments (1978) ISBN 0-394-42793-9
• The Company of Women (1981) ISBN 0-394-50508-5
• The Other Side (1989) ISBN 0-670-82566-2
• Spending (1998) ISBN 0-684-85204-7
• Pearl (2005) ISBN 0-375-42315-X
• The Love of My Youth (2011) ISBN 0-307-37742-3

Novellas and short story collections

• The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (1994) ISBN 0-14-014907-4
• Temporary Shelter (1987) ISBN 0-394-55520-1
• The Stories of Mary Gordon (2006) ISBN 0-375-42316-8 (collects Temporary Shelter and 22 previously uncollected stories)

Non-fiction

• Memoirs
  • The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search For Her Father (1996) ISBN 0-679-74931-4
  • Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (2000) ISBN 0-684-86255-7
  • Circling My Mother: A Memoir (2007) ISBN 0-375-42456-3

• Essays
  • Good Boys and Dead Girls, and Other Essays (1991) ISBN 0-670-82567-0

• Religion
  • Reading Jesus (2009)^[5] ISBN 0-375-42457-1

• Biography
  • Joan of Arc (2000) ISBN 0-670-88537-1

Prizes and Awards

In 1993, Gordon received a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[6] Her other awards include a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, an O. Henry Award, and Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[7] The Stories of Mary Gordon won The Story Prize in 2007. In March, 2008 Governor Eliot Spitzer named Mary Gordon the official New York State Author and gave her the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction.^[8]

References

1. ^ Governor's press release.
2. ^ PBS website
3. ^ Keller, Rosemary Skinner; Ruether, Rosemary Radford; Cantlon, Marie (2006). Encyclopedia of women and religion in North America. 3. Indiana University Press. pp. 1104–1106. ISBN 0253346886. 
4. ^ The BEATRICE Interview: 1999
5. ^ http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/exegesis/prodigal-son/
6. ^ "Mary Gordon". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. http://www.gf.org/fellows/5644-mary-gordon. 
7. ^ "Mary Gordon Author Bookshelf". Random House. http://www.randomhouse.com/author/10600/mary-gordon. 
8. ^ Barnard Prof Named New York State Author | Columbia Spectator

External links

• Mary Gordon Interview transcript from the New York State Writers Institute
• [1], an excellent unvarnished account on the Barnard website with links to recent work and reviews
• Mary Gordon Interview, video with Bill Moyers for his program, 'Faith and Reason', from 2006
• Works by or about Mary Gordon (writer) in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Lopate Show with The Story Prize finalists: Rick Bass, Mary Gordon, and George Saunders (2/27/07)

Persondata
Name	Gordon, Mary
Alternative names	Gordon, Mary Catherine (full name)
Short description	Novelist, memoirist, literary critic
Date of birth	December 8, 1949
Place of birth	Far Rockaway, New York, United States
Date of death
Place of death