Hortense Calisher

Writer, born in New York City, New York, USA. A Barnard graduate, she wrote short stories and novels, typically set among New York's upper middle class, but also dealing with a range of subjects including racial conflict. Best known for her short stories, a collected edition was published in 1975. She held visiting lectureships at many universities, and is married to the writer Curtis Harnack.

Hortense Calisher (born New York City December 20, 1911) is an American writer of fiction.

A graduate of Barnard College (1932), she was the daughter of a young German immigrant and an older father from a Southern family she described as "volcanic to meditative to fruitfully dull, and bound to produce someone interested in character, society, and time" (Tattoo for a Slave), she has involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Tales for the Mirror (1962), Textures of Life, (1963), Extreme Magic (1964), Journey from Ellipsia (1966), The Railway Police, and The Last Trolley Ride (1966), The New Yorkers (1970), Standard Dreaming (1972), Eagle Eye (1973), Queenie (1973), The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher 1975), On Keeping Women (1977), Mysteries of Motion (1983), Saratoga Hot (1985), The Bobby-Soxer (1986), Age (1987), Kissing Cousins: A Memory (1988), The Small Bang (under the pseudonym of Jack Fenno) (1992), In the Palace of the Movie King (1993), In the Slammer with Carol Smith (1997), Sunday Jews (2003), and Tattoo for a Slave (2004).

Her collected novellas were published in 1997.

A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she has been a National Book Award finalist three times and has won an O.