One of the most versatile contemporary American writers, Cynthia Ozick has written novels, short fiction, essays, poems, a play, and many articles and reviews. In the United States she has received the most acclaim for her short stories, while in Britain she is more highly regarded as an essayist. Ozick herself takes issue with the distinction; in her introduction to Quarrel & Quandary (2000) she writes, "What I am repudiating is the inference that . . . an essay is generally more than simply another fiction--a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a very great while) an illumination. But never a tenet." Yet, she is perhaps best known internationally for her Holocaust fiction, in particular for The Shawl (1989), comprising "The Shawl" (often anthologized) and "Rosa," which were initially published separately in The New Yorker in 1980 and 1983.

Cynthia Ozick was born in New York...