Calisher, Hortense

Hortense Calisher (1911-2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled "In the Absence of Angels", appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties.A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of write...