Calisher was born in New York City on 20 December 1911 to Joseph and Hedwig Lichtstern Calisher. Her father was born in Richmond, Virginia, where his father, Henry Jacob Calisher, was an elder of the synagogue in 1832. Joseph Calisher moved to New York City as a young man and became a manufacturer of fine soaps and perfumes. He met his future wife, a German émigré twenty-two years his junior, at the Saratoga races. As Calisher has commented, the mix of generations, backgrounds, and powerful personalities in her household were "bound to produce someone interested in character, society and time." She has written a dozen autobiographical stories about growing up in that household. Even as they conjure up a bygone era, these stories are never mere period pieces. Eugenie Bolger compares Calisher's achievement to James Joyce's, writing that her stories "are to New York what Joyce's Dubliners is to Dublin, the subtlest social observation wrapped in rue" (New Leader, 19 January 1976).
In a July 1978 Mademoiselle article, which Calisher titled "My Life as a Female Sex Object," she describes not only the sensual atmosphere created by an abundance of nineteenth-century "genteel porn," but also and more important, the emotional and intellectual nurturing she and her younger brother received.
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