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Alison Lurie

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Author

The Resume

    (September 3, 1926-December 3, 2020)
    Born in Chicago, Illinois
    Wrote the novels ‘Imaginary Friends’ (1967), ‘The War Between the Tates’ (1974), Foreign Affairs’ (1984), ‘The Last Resort’ (1998), and ‘Truth and Consequences’ (2005)
    Professor of Children’s Literature and American Literature at Cornell
    Nonfiction works include ‘The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales’ (1975), ‘The Language of Clothes’ (1981), ‘Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups’ (1990), and ‘The Language of Houses’ (2014)

Why she might be annoying:

    She described her activities at boarding school as ‘reading and avoiding sports.’
    Her parody of the Yaddo artists’ colony in her novel ‘Real People’ (1969) caused such hard feelings that she never returned.
    Despite being a leading expert on children’s literature, she never wrote stories for children herself: ‘It would be nice if I could have. I've never had an idea that I thought would have worked as children's fiction.’

Why she might not be annoying:

    Due to complications from a forceps-aided delivery, she was born deaf in one ear and with damage to her facial muscles.
    The library in one Midwestern town removed her debut novel, ‘Love and Friendship‘ (1962), from the shelves and burned it because it mentioned contraception.
    She was arrested at Cornell for protesting against the university’s investments in companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa (1985).
    She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for ‘Foreign Affairs.’
    She said about her Pulitzer, ‘I think it is significant that the only book of mine that got a big literary award was the only one in which I've killed off a major character. Somehow tragedy attracts awards and comedy doesn't.’

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 10 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 110 Votes: 50.0% Annoying