Alison Lurie

Lurie was born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, the daughter of a sociologist; she studied at Radcliffe College and married young, publishing her first novels while raising three sons and working odd jobs as a secretary and researcher before landing a long teaching post at Cornell University.

Foreign Affairs (1984) follows a prim, unglamorous American professor and a brash engineer thrown together in London, its comedy of manners and mismatched romance winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: the capstone to a career of novels dissecting academia, marriage, and the small vanities of intelligent people.

She taught children's literature and folklore at Cornell for over three decades, wrote influential nonfiction on fairy tales and clothing, and continued publishing fiction into her eighties.