Mary Gordon (1) (1949–)

Mary Gordon was born in 1949 in Far Rockaway, New York. She was an only child, raised in a tightly-knit and pious Catholic home. She began writing as a child and dreamed of becoming a nun. The loss of her father in 1957, when she was seven years old, was the most important event of her youth, and she would later channel her grief into many works of fiction, and finally into her memoir, The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for her Father (1996). She attended Barnard College over her mother's objections (as it was not a Catholic institution) and worked at a series of secretarial and babysitting jobs in order to pay her way. She became involved in the feminist and anti-war movements of the late 1960s, and has continued to contribute to progressive causes throughout her life. She received an M.A. from Syracuse University, but left short of a Ph.D. in order to marry Jim Brain, an English professor nearly 30 years her senior. She taught writing at Duchess County Community College, and lived with her husband in London for a year. Her first marriage dissolved when she became involved with Arthur Cash, another much-older English professor; they married in 1979. Her first novel, Final Payments, was published in 1978 to tremendous critical acclaim, followed quickly by The Company of Women in 1981. Although she continued to write poetry, essays, reviews and nonfiction, her attention was divided for a time by the birth of her two children, and it was four years before her next book was published. She became the Millicent Macintosh Chair of English at Barnard College. The New York Times has called her "her generation's preeminent novelist of Roman Catholic mores and manners."
Other works include Men and Angels (1985),
The Other Side (1989), Pearl (2005),
The Love of My Youth (2011), The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (1994), and
The Liar's Wife (2014).