Alix shulman biography of christopher paul

Alix Kates Shulman

American novelist

Alix Kates Shulman (born August 17, ) is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best-known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, ), hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."[1]

Her books have been translated into 12 languages.

She has taught writing and women's literature widely in the U.S., including at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu), where she held the Citizens Chair, New York University, The New School, the University of Southern Maine, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Yale University. She received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Case Western Reserve University in [2]

Early life and education

Shulman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 17, , to Dorothy Davis Kates, a community organizer,[3] and Samuel Simon Kates, a labor arbitrator.

After attending Cleveland Heights public schools, in she received a BA in history and philosophy from Western Reserve University.[4] She then moved to New York City to study philosophy at the Columbia University Graduate School and later received an MA in Humanities from New York University.[5] She was an early member of the feminist organization Redstockings.[6]

Writing career

"A Marriage Agreement"

Shulman first emerged as the author of the controversial essay "A Marriage Agreement",[7] which proposed that women and men split childcare and housework equally, and detailed a way of doing so.

Originally published in the small feminist journal Up From Under in August , it was widely reprinted in large-circulation mainstream magazines like Life and Redbook, as well as in the premier issue of Ms. magazine; it subsequently appeared in a number of anthologies, including a Harvard textbook on contract law.[8]

Fiction

Following several children's books, Shulman's first adult novel, the seriocomic million-copy Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, ), was published.

A feminist classic, it is the coming-of-age story, from childhood through motherhood, of middle-class, white, sexually precocious and emotionally confused Sasha Davis, as she navigates the pressures, discrimination, and absurdities facing a pre-feminist midth-century young woman of ambition. Almost continuously in print since , it was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in by Penguin, a 35th anniversary "Feminist Classics" edition in by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG), as an e-book in by Open Road, and in many foreign language editions.[9]

Her next book, Burning Questions (Knopf, ), is a historical novel about the rise of the women's liberation movement in late s New York City, an experience Shulman knew firsthand.

A fictional autobiography of a white middle-class rebel conscious of class ironies, the novel presents the new movement in a historical tradition of radical and revolutionary women, and “chronicles the important changes in women’s lives and consciousness wrought by contemporary feminism.”[1] A literary blog described Burning Questions as "the best, most accurate historical novel I have read about the Women's Liberation Movement."[10]

On the Stroll (Knopf, ), her third novel, takes on the themes of homelessness, sexual exploitation, and prostitution through the story of a shopping-bag lady and a teenage runaway who is preyed upon by a pimp, over the course of one summer.[11]

Her fourth novel, In Every Woman's Life (Knopf, ), is both a comedy of manners and a novel of ideas.

It explores marriage and singleness in light of the social changes brought by second-wave feminism.[12]

Ménage (Other Press, ), Shulman's fifth novel, represents a return to fiction after a twenty-five-year departure to memoir. A satire of the wealthy one percent and the literary life, Ménage explores what happens when a real-estate developer and his restless wife invite a literary star to live with them in their mansion.

Ménage was described in reviews as “delightfully wicked, verging on the malevolent” (Kirkus Reviews)[13] and "wickedly funny." (Boston Globe)[14]

Memoirs

In the s Shulman turned from fiction to memoir.[15]Drinking the Rain (FSG, ) recounts her experience of going off at age fifty to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine, without electricity, plumbing, road, or phone.

As she is thrown back on herself, she learns to love solitude, independence, and the natural world.

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  • Alix shulman biography of christopher paul

    • Drinking the Rain won a Body Mind Spirit Award of Excellence and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.[16]

    A Good Enough Daughter (Random House, Schocken Books, ) is a memoir of her life as a daughter to loving parents, to whom she returns in their old age to see them through their final years.[17]

    To Love What Is (FSG, ) is Shulman's account of caring for her husband following a accident that left him seriously brain-impaired.

    In it she describes their half-century-long love affair and the ways they adapted their lives to his increasing disability.[18]

    Non-fiction

    In Library of America published Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can, an anthology of major writings of feminism’s second wave, , co-edited by Shulman and Honor Moore.[19]

    In , the essay collection A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing was published by Open Road.[20]

    Her other non-fiction includes two books on anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman: the biography To The Barricades (l, ), which was a New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year,[21] and Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (Random House, ).

    Except for her three children's books–Bosley on the Number Line (David McKay, ), Finders Keepers (Bradbury Press, ), and Awake or Asleep (Addison Wesley, )–all her titles are available as e-books.[22]

    Activism

    In the early s Shulman was active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

    She named the theater arts chapter, 7-Arts CORE, prior to the group's attending the March on Washington, and with the group she demonstrated against racial discrimination in New York City.

    She became opposed to the Vietnam War, counseling draftees on their rights at the Quaker Meeting House and the Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church, both in Manhattan.

    In she was arrested at a sit-in at the Whitehall Street Induction Center in lower Manhattan.[23] Later, while a visiting professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder in , she was arrested at a large demonstration to keep the CIA from recruiting on campus. On the bus that served as paddy wagon for arrested protesters, she and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg held an impromptu antiwar teach-in.[24]

    It was in late that Shulman first became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) in New York City.

    She participated in the weekly discussion group New York Radical Women, one of the first women’s liberation groups in New York City. Subsequently, she joined several small feminist consciousness-raising groups (Redstockings, WITCH, New York Radical Feminists) and political action groups (CARASA, No More Nice Girls, Feminist Futures, Take Back the Future).[2]

    In , the "Wall Street Ogle-In", which involved Shulman and others, took place.

    The events of September regarding Francine Gottfried made an impression on second-wave feminists in New York City, and in March , they retaliated in a raid on Wall Street which they dubbed the "Ogle-In", in which a large group of feminists, including Shulman, Karla Jay, and a number of women who had participated in the sit-in at Ladies Home Journal a few weeks before, sexually harassed male Wall Streeters on their way to work with catcalls and crude remarks.[25]

    Shulman’s activism included the arts.

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    • In she helped organize Feminists on Children’s Literature (later renamed Feminists on Children’s Media), to examine widespread female stereotypes in children’s books. The group presented its findings to the American Library Association’s annual meeting.[1] In , after their first production, "Rape In," Shulman became a member of the Advisory Board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective – a NYC-based feminist theater group – and of the New York Feminist Art Institute.

    In , she became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP), an American nonprofit publishing organization that works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.[26]

    She was one of the planners of the first national demonstration of women's liberation, which catapulted the movement to national attention, the August Miss America protest in Atlantic City.

    The beauty standards that were being protested inspired, and became a major theme of, her debut novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.

    Shulman's activism included participation, from onward, in a number of public speak-outs and conferences on such feminist issues as beauty standards, rape, violence against women, abortion, reproductive rights, prostitution, marriage, and motherhood.[27][28] The goal of the speak-out was to initiate a public dialogue on experiences that at the time were widely considered private or taboo subjects of speech.

    In the film Speak Out: I Had an Abortion, Shulman and other subjects testify to having had multiple abortions. Shulman said that "not one was the result of carelessness" but, rather, all were due to the failure of the birth control devices she used.[29]

    In , Shulman joined the faculty of Sagaris, a radical feminist institute held in Lyndonville, VT, which operated as a summer think tank and school for feminist activism ().[30]

    Along with other "sex-positive" feminists, Shulman joined the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT), a group founded in to defend free speech from efforts by the anti-pornography wing of the movement to promote government intervention against pornography.[31]

    In , as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu, she was a founder of a Pacific chapter of the pro-choice political action group No More Nice Girls.

    The Pacific chapter organized demonstrations, held a speak-out on abortion, and put on street theater in Honolulu.[2]

    In the s, she was active on the board of THEA (The House of Elder Artists), an organization attempting to establish a new kind of retirement community in Manhattan for politically and artistically active seniors.[32] That group did not succeed, but Shulman continued her anti-ageist activism through her writing.[33]

    In , Shulman joined the Occupy Wall Street movement and soon became part of the women's caucus, Women Occupy Wall Street, which put on four Feminist General Assemblies around New York City.[7]

    Shulman is featured in three documentaries on second-wave feminist history: She's Beautiful When She's Angry;[34][35]Makers: Women Who Make America, Part I;[36] and Feminist Stories from Women's Liberation .[37]

    Honors

    In Alix Shulman was awarded a DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship; in she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome; in she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction;[38] in – she was elected VP of the PEN America Center; in she was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy; in she received the Woman Trailblazer Award from the Mayor of Cleveland; in she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Case Western Reserve University;[4] in she received the American Jewish Press Association Simon Rockower Award; in she became a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities;[39] in she was awarded a Patricia & Jerri Magnione Fellowship from The MacDowell Colony; and in she received a Clara Lemlich award for a lifetime of social activism.[40][2]

    Personal life

    Shulman was married for a short time to a graduate student in the English department at Columbia.

    In she married her second husband, Martin Shulman, with whom she had two children. Following their divorce, in she married Scott York, whom she had first dated when she was in high school, and lived with him until his death in His traumatic brain injury led her to become an advocate for the elderly and disabled.[33]

    Shulman's daughter, Polly Shulman, is an author.

    Her son, Theodore Shulman, a pro-choice activist, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in February , on charges of making interstate threats to anti-abortion advocates.[41] In October he was sentenced by federal judge Paul Crotty to 41 months in prison.

    Alix shulman biography of christopher kennedy Alix Kates Shulman born August 17, is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best-known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Knopf, , hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement. Her books have been translated into 12 languages. She has taught writing and women's literature widely in the U. She received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Case Western Reserve University in

    Books

    • Bosley on the Number Line ()
    • To The Barricades ()
    • Finders Keepers ()
    • Awake or Asleep ()
    • Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen ()
    • Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader ()
    • Burning Questions ()
    • On the Stroll ()
    • In Every Woman's Life ()
    • Drinking the Rain ()
    • A Good Enough Daughter ()
    • To Love What Is ()
    • Ménage ()
    • A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing ()
    • Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writing That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can ()

    See also

    References

    1. ^ abDavidson, Cathy; Wagner-Martin, Linda, eds.

      (). "Shulman, Alix Kates". The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Oxford University Press. ISBN&#;.

    2. ^ abcdLove, Barbara, ed.

      Alix shulman biography of christopher columbus This million-copy bestseller, called "the first important novel to emerge from the women's liberation movement," takes a wry, sardonic look at the double-binds of growing up female and sexy in white middle-class pre-feminist America. Today it can be read as a precursor of MeToo, dramatizing every sort of sexual harassment and assault. Almost continuously in print, on its 35th anniversary this debut novel was pubished as a "feminist classic" by FSG, and on its 40th anniversary as an ebook. Renewed rage against the patriarchy has suddenly brought the novel a new young readership. Daily Mail UK - "This dazzling novel blazes with fury at women's lot from the Forties onwards … Shulman's gripping account of the female experience in a man's world is hilarious, shudder-making and inspirational.

      (). Feminists Who Changed America . University of Illinois Press.

    3. ^"Finding aid for the Dorothy Davis Kates Papers". . Retrieved October 9,
    4. ^ ab"Did You Know: Alix Kates Shulman". The Daily. March 20,
    5. ^"Alumni Notes"(PDF).

      Alix shulman biography of christopher cross

      Shulman: I did not intend to be a writer. I first wanted to be a lawyer, like my father. Then I got bit by the bug of philosophy and wanted to be a philosophy professor. I went to graduate school and quickly discovered it was impossible for a woman in those days—this was the early fifties—to be a philosopher, so I gave that up. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen , is the product of that urgency.

      Gallatin Today. New York University. Spring

    6. ^Biography, , accessed online 11 July
    7. ^ ab"Alix Kates Shulman". Jewish Women's Archive.
    8. ^"Do We Need Marriage Agreements? | Psychology Today". . Retrieved October 9,
    9. ^"editions of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen".

      GoodReads.

    10. ^"Alix Kates Shulman". mirabile dictu. July 6, Retrieved October 9,
    11. ^"Books of The Times". The New York Times. September 16,
    12. ^"Summer Reading; Yes to Family, No to Monogamy". The New York Times.

      May 31,

    13. ^MÉNAGE | Kirkus Reviews.
    14. ^"'Running With the Kenyans,' 'Ménage,' 'The Omnivorous Mind' - The Boston Globe". . Retrieved October 9,
    15. ^"Books by Alix Kates Shulman".

      Alix shulman biography of christopher jackson: Alix Kates Shulman (born August 17, ) is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism.

      Publishers Weekly.

    16. ^"Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist | Book awards | LibraryThing". . Retrieved October 9,
    17. ^"A Good Enough Daughter". Kirkus Reviews. April 2,
    18. ^"Enduring Love".

      Alix shulman biography of christopher Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Alix attended public schools and planned to be a lawyer like her dad. After some years as an encyclopedia editor, she enrolled at New York University, in a special program in mathematics, and later, while raising two children, earned an MA in Humanities. She became a civil rights activist in and a feminist activist in She published her first book in and taught her first class in Having explored in her five novels the challenges of youth and midlife, in her three memoirs she probed the later stages in the ongoing drama of her generation of women, taking on the terrors and rewards of solitude, of her parents' final years, and of her late-life calling as caregiver to her beloved husband for a decade until his death in

      The Observer. October 8,

    19. ^"Nonfiction Book Review: Women's Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can by Edited by Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore. Library of America, $ (p) ISBN ". . February 16, Retrieved October 9,
    20. ^"A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays".

      Open Road Media.

    21. ^"Outstanding Books of the Year". The New York Times. November 7, ISSN&#; Retrieved October 9,
    22. ^"Alix Kates Shulman". Open Road Media.
    23. ^" Seized Here in Draft Protest". . Retrieved October 15,
    24. ^"A peaceful three-day demonstration against CIA recruiters on the"UPI.

      Retrieved October 9,

    25. ^Jay, Karla. Tales of the Lavender Menace, (Basic Books, ), pp. –
    26. ^"Associates | The Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press". . Retrieved June 21,
    27. ^Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad. University of Minnesota Press,
    28. ^Brownmiller, Susan.

      In Our Time. The Dial Press,

    29. ^"I Had an Abortion". . Retrieved October 10,
    30. ^"The Women Activists Found Little Peace At Bucolic School". The New York Times. August 29, ISSN&#; Retrieved October 9,
    31. ^calliechavoustie (November 24, ).

      "Anti-Censorship Feminism". Feminist Debate Over Pornography. Retrieved October 9,

    32. ^Brown, Patricia Leigh (August 24, ). "GENERATIONS; Raising More Than Consciousness Now". The New York Times. Retrieved October 10,
    33. ^ abShulman, Alix Kates (May 9, ).

      "Caring for an Ill Spouse, and for Other Caregivers". The New York Times. ISSN&#; Retrieved October 9,

    34. ^"The Women". She's Beautiful When She's Angry.
    35. ^"The Film — She's Beautiful When She's Angry". Retrieved April 28,
    36. ^Makers: Women Who Make America (TV Series – ) - IMDb, retrieved October 9,
    37. ^Lee, Jennifer, Eastwood, Valerie; Good, Martha; Kling, Betty Jean; Morgan, Robin; Friedan, Betty; Steinem, Gloria; Norton, Eleanor Holmes; Hernandez, Aileen C; Rosen, Ruth (), Feminist: Stories from Women's Liberation, OCLC&#;, retrieved October 9, : CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
    38. ^"National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Annual Report "(PDF).

      p.&#;

    39. ^"Alix Kates Shulman". New York Institute for the Humanities.
    40. ^"Labor Arts". . Retrieved October 9,
    41. ^NY man gets jail for threats to anti-abortion foes, The Wall Street Journal, October 3,

    Further reading

    • Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time, Dial Press,
    • Susan Koppleman Cornellon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction, Bowling Green Univ.

      Popular Press,

    • Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad, Univ. of Minnesota Press,
    • Barbara Love, ed., Feminists Who Changed America –, Univ. of Illinois Press,
    • Lisa Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press,
    • The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing, Oxford Univ.

      Press,

    • Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open, Viking,
    • Kristen Swinth, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight, Harvard Univ. Press,
    • Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World

    External links