Alison Lurie (Bishop) was born in Chicago on 3 September 1926. She received the A.B. degree from Radcliffe College in 1947 and the following year married Jonathan Peale Bishop, Jr. They have three sons. She was the recipient of Yaddo Foundation...

THE TRUTH ABOUT LORIN JONES, by Alison Lurie. Little, Brown. 328 pp. $18.95. The truth about Lorin Jones, Alison Lurie establishes, is that there isn't any. Or that no single truth about anything as complex as a human being can be all-encompassing. ...

Alison Lurie, the American writer and academic, the Professor of Literature at Cornell University, the Pulitzer Prize-winner, the best-selling novelist, is sloshing curdled tea down the lavatory. She's in the bathroom because the kitchen, to which she's already made several trips, is through the...

In the following essay, Newman provides an overview of Lurie's early life and education, her formative experiences with the Poets' Theatre, the origin of recurring themes and characters in her fiction, and the inadequacies of her critical appraisal.

In the following essay, Newman examines the use of intertextual literary themes and cultural slippages in Foreign Affairs, contending that, rather than reinforcing the fictional stereotypes of Henry James, Frances Hodges Burnett, or John Gay, Lurie subverts traditional clashes between Americans and Europeans and nature and culture to reveal the generative possibilities inherent in such interacting oppositions.

In the following essay, Rogers examines Lurie's dissection of traditional marital inequities and her presentation of sexual infidelity as a catalyst for newfound self-awareness and independence among the passive, self-sacrificing women characters of her novels.