Lisa Alther

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Lisa Alther (born Elisabeth Greene Reed on July 23, 1944 in Kingsport , Tennessee ) is an American writer .

She studied English literature at Wellesley College and graduated with a BA in 1966. She attended the Publishing Procedures Course at Radcliffe College . After graduating, she worked as a publicist in New York for Atheneum Publishers and moved to Hinesburg, Vermont, where she lived for about 30 years and taught southern literature at St. Michael's College in Winooski. In between she lived again and again in London and Paris. In 1966 she married Richard Alther, a painter. Their daughter Sara Halsey, born on November 15, 1968, lived with her mother after her parents divorced.

Working intensively with female writers from the American South such as Eudora Welty , Flannery O'Connor , Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers , she was encouraged to write herself, primarily novels. After her manuscripts, as she herself announced, had been rejected 250 times, she managed to publish her first novel Kinflicks in 1976 . The sexual permissiveness described in the novel is compared to the novel Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973).

The success of the novel made it possible for the author to work on her texts for a long time and write four to five drafts before she published the respective novel, which is why her novels appeared at long intervals. All of her novels became bestsellers, and her five novels, translated into fifteen languages, sold a total of six million copies. The novel Birdman and the Dancer was only published in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.

A special feature of this writer, which may have contributed to the success, is the ironic coloring and sometimes comedy with which she deals with topics such as racism, religion and the disadvantage of women in her novels and short stories.

bibliography

  • Kinflicks , Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1976
    • German: Hautkontakte , translated by Gisela Stege, Ullstein, Berlin 1977.
  • A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories , 1980.
  • Original Sins , Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1981.
    • German: When paradise was lost , translated by Gisela Stege, Ullstein, Frankfurt, Berlin 1986.
  • Other Women , Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1984.
    • German: Worse than tomorrow, better than yesterday , translated by Adelheid Zöfel, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-499-15942-2 .
  • Bedrock , Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1990, Penguin Books, London 1990, ISBN 0-14-013407-7 .
    • German: A special woman , translator: Cornelia Holfelder-von der Tann, Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-498-00051-9 .
  • Five Minutes in Heaven , Dutton, New York 1995, ISBN 0-525-93893-1 .
    • German: Five minutes in heaven , translated by Cornelia Holfelder-von der Tann, Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-498-00051-9 .
  • Birdman and the Dancer , Gyldendal , Copenhagen 1993; Contact, Amsterdam 1994.
    • German: The bird man and the dancer , translated by Cornelia Holfelder-von der Tann, Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-8052-0566-X .
  • with Françoise Gilot : About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter. Nan A. Talese, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-385-53986-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Mary Anne Ferguson in Southern Writers, A New Biographical Dictionary , edited by Joseph M. Flora, Amber Vogel and Bryan Giemza, LSU Press 2006, ISBN 0-8071-3123-7 , keyword "Alther, Lisa"; In the International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2004 on page 14, the year of publication is incorrectly given as 1975.
  2. ↑ a b Bibliography , Lisa Alther Official Homepage, accessed October 31, 2010.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Alther, Lisa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH July 23, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingsport , Tennessee