Grace Paley was born in New York City in 1922. Her parents, Isaac and Mary Goodside, were Russian Jewish immigrants who supported socialist and Zionist causes. Paley credits her parents' intellectual interests and political activism for encouraging her own feminist and leftist beliefs. The predominately Jewish area of the Bronx in which she grew up and the immigrant experiences of her parents also influenced Paley's concern with Jewish protagonists and Jewish-American life.

Paley attended Hunter College in New York City but dropped out without receiving a degree. In 1942, at the age of twenty, she married a photographer and cameraman, Jess Paley, with whom she had two children, a son and a daughter. Paley separated from Jess three years later and subsequently married the poet and playwright Robert Nichols. In 1942, Paley studied poetry with W. H. Auden at the New School for Social Research. During her early career...