Born in the Bronx, New York City, on December 11, 1922, Grace Goodside was the youngest child of Jewish socialist immigrants. She attended Hunter College and New York University from 1938 to 1939. She married Jess Paley in 1942 and, while raising two children, wrote poetry. In her mid-thirties she began to write short stories as well.
With The Little Disturbances of Man, 1959, her first collection of short stories, she introduced her alter-ego, Faith Darwin, whose first person narratives would return now and again throughout her stories, to delight of faithful readers. Another collection of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, was published in 1974: later three of these stories were made into a film of the same title. Later the Same Day was published in 1985. Her collected stories appeared in 1994, in a volume published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Paley╒s stories characteristically take place in a single setting╤typically somewhere unremarkable, like a park bench or a hospital room╤and are marked by wit and starkness.
Paley also published collections of poetry. In the 1960s, she was a familiar figure in Greenwich Village and was actively engaged in the antiwar movement. In 1988, she wrote the text for Three Hundred Sixty-Five Reasons Not to Have Another War, a calendar. She has taught at several universities, most recently at Sarah Lawrence College. She was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980 and was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1972 she married writer Robert Nichols, whose home in Vermont was a favorite retreat.
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