H. Auden. "When I wrote poetry I was very keenly aware of being influenced," Paley told the online literary magazine
Salon. "When I was young, I wrote a lot like Auden. It's kind of comical, because after all, I didn't have a British accent.... I had no sense of my own language yet."
As a student Paley attended Hunter College and New York University. She married early, in 1942, and settled with her husband in Greenwich Village, where they raised two children (the marriage would eventually end in divorce). In this community of artists, intellectuals, and bohemians, Paley became involved in leftist politics. She frequented anti-war and anti-nuclear demonstrations, and she became engaged in local issues (opposing, for example, the city's proposed plan to build a road through Washington Square).
Wrote First Short Stories
As a young mother in the mid-1950s, Paley made her initial forays into writing fiction. The urge to tell stories had begun to grow in her, but the responsibilities of motherhood called. Falling ill one day, she arranged for her children to attend an after-school program while she convalesced. Paley was not too ill to sit at a typewriter, however, and the extra hours of quiet and solitude were all she needed to begin writing fiction.
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