Alison Lurie, 94
The Pulitzer-winning novelist and professor died Thursday.
Alison Lurie, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose satirical and cerebral tales of love and academia included the marital saga “The War Between the Tates” and the comedy of Americans abroad “Foreign Affairs,” has died at age 94.
Lurie, a professor emerita at Cornell University, died Thursday of natural causes, said her husband and partner, Edward Hower.
Praised by the New York Times as one of the country’s “most able and witty novelists,” Lurie broke through commercially in 1974 with “The War Between the Tates” and received her highest acclaim for “Foreign Affairs,” winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize.
Set in London, “Foreign Affairs” is based on old-fashioned narratives of manners and customs, with one character imagining himself trapped in a Henry James story. The protagonists are Corinth University professor Virginia “Vinnie” Martin, an Anglophile and middleaged scholar of children’s literature whose closest companion is an invisible dog, and her wayward young colleague, Fred Turner, who takes up with the impulsive British actress Rosemary Radley as his marriage falls apart back home.
Lurie’s novel was adapted into a 1993 television movie starring Joanne Woodward and Eric Stoltz. “The War Between the Tates” became a 1977 TV production featuring Elizabeth Ashley and Richard Crenna.
Academics and artists were often featured in her work, which combined storytelling with social and intellectual commentary. Her first book, “Love and Friendship,” centered on a professor’s wife in New England who has an intense affair with a school musician. In “The War Between the Tates,” a Corinth professor’s adultery upends his marriage and scatters husband and wife into the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s.
Her other works included the novel “The Last Resort,” a memoir “Familiar Spirits” and the literary essay collection “Words and Worlds,” which was released in 2019.
In her fiction, Lurie drew openly from her own life. Corinth was an Ivy League school that closely approximated Cornell, and she shared Vinnie’s love for England and expertise in children’s literature, editing such compilations as “The Heavenly Zoo.”
She wrote about Vietnam War protests and participated in them. In 1985, she was arrested during a rally at Cornell that called on the school to sell off its investments in companies doing business with South Africa’s racist government.
Married in 1948 to Jonathan Bishop, an academic and son of the poet John Bishop Peale, she separated from him around the time “The War Between the Tates” was published and later married Hower, an author and Cornell literature professor. She had three sons with Bishop.
When “Love and Friendship” came out in 1962, it got right to a favorite theme.
“The day on which Emily Stockwell Turner fell out of love with her husband,” Lurie wrote in the book’s opening sentence, “began much like other days.”