"The Long-Distance Runner" by Grace Paley is the last story in the collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which appeared in 1974. The story is also available in The Collected Stories (1994). The story features Paley's lead protagonist, Faith Darwin Asbury, who at forty-two has taken up long-distance running.
This semi-autobiographical character shares Paley's concern for social justice and her awareness of the cultural and economic divisions between the races, recurrent themes in Paley's fiction. The short story foregrounds Paley's skillful use of dialogue as a way of dramatizing differences between individuals in a given neighborhood. In this story, Faith travels back to her childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn and witnesses from the inside the deterioration of the now all African American tenement where her family once lived.
This complete Introduction contains 128 words. This
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