Alison Lurie was born in Chicago on September 3, 1926. She attended Radcliffe College, where she received an A.B. degree in 1947. The following year she married Jonathan Peale Bishop, Jr., who went on to become a professor of English at Cornell University. Before their divorce in 1985, the Bishops had three sons, John, Jeremy, and Joshua.

Lurie’s first book was a privately printed memoir of a close friend, poet and playwright Violet Lang, but her first significant work of fiction was Love and Friendship (1962), a novel that contains the themes of domestic dissatisfaction and adultery that Lurie would continue to explore in later work. Its principal character, Emily Stockwell Turner, is the prototype of Katherine Cattleman, Erica Tate, and the other unfulfilled, frustrated, middle-class American women who populate Lurie’s narratives.

In addition to being a housewife and mother and working occasionally as a ghostwriter and librarian, Lurie continued to publish her novels, gaining more critical acclaim and a wider readership with each one: The Nowhere City (1965), Imaginary Friends (1967), and Real People (1969). Moreover, she began to garner fellowships and grants that helped further her career as a writer: Yaddo fellowships in 1963, 1964, and 1966 (Yaddo, an artist’s colony, gave Lurie material for Real People); a Guggenheim grant in 1965-1966; and a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1967-1968. Finally, in 1968 she joined the faculty of Cornell, where she eventually became, like her husband, a professor of English, teaching fiction writing and children’s literature. Cornell became the fictional Corinth University of her later novels, and its faculty served as models for the well-educated, crisis-ridden academics that she places there.

It was her fifth novel, The War Between the Tates (1974), that earned Lurie an international reputation. Her most ambitious novel, the book captures the flavor of the early 1970’s—its radical chic, comic conservatism, mindless rebellion, generation gaps, confused feminism, political marches, and private battles between the sexes. Nothing escapes Lurie’s sharp tongue and witty intelligence, and the result is a mercilessly satiric attack on American middle-class values. It remains her best-known novel, and it was adapted as a television movie.

Her reputation secure, Lurie published four novels after The War Between the Tates. Only Children (1979) appeared to mixed reviews, but Foreign Affairs (1984) earned for Lurie the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, as well as an American Book Award nomination and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for best work of fiction. The Truth About Lorin Jones appeared in 1988, and The Last Resort was published in 1998. In addition, she began publishing children’s fiction: The Heavenly Zoo (1980), Clever Gretchen, and Other Forgotten Folktales (1980), Fabulous Beasts (1981), and The Black Geese: A Baba Yaga Story from Russia (1999, with Jessica Souhami), stories that often privilege women in ways that traditional folk tales do not.

In 1981, Lurie published a comprehensive history of clothing, The Language of Clothes, which argues for clothing as a communication system, a “language” that presents nonverbal information about people’s occupations, interests, personalities, opinions, and tastes. The author employs photographs and illustrations, insights from literature, psychology, and sociology, and examples from her own experiences to inform this highly original work.

Lurie became a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989. In addition to teaching at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, she lives in London and Key West, Florida.