Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City on April 17, 1928, the second child of pharmacist William Ozick and Celia Regelson Ozick. She was raised in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, a middle-class neighborhood, where she attended Public School 71. “At P.S. 71,” Ozick once remarked in an interview, “I was dumb, cross-eyed, and couldn’t do arithmetic.” Remembering encounters with anti-Semitic teachers and peers, she vividly recalls “teachers who hurt me, who made me believe I was stupid and inferior.”

Regardless of her negative early educational experiences, Ozick emerged as a gifted academic. Her youth was spent devouring books, sometimes for eighteen hours a day. She attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan and New York University, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English. She then taught from 1949 to 1951 at Ohio State University, where she earned an M.A. Her thesis, “Parable in the Later Novels of Henry James,” revealed an early reverence for that late nineteenth and early twentieth century American novelist. In fact, throughout much of Ozick’s early fiction rings a distinctive Jamesian tone.

Although she knew her destiny was to be a novelist, Ozick began her literary career by composing poetry, a pursuit she interspersed with fiction and essay writing until age thirty-six but then dropped. Her primary goal, writing a great modern novel, she began immediately after acquiring her graduate degree and marrying Bernard Hollote, a lawyer. She ambitiously began writing a “philosophical” novel, taking seven years to compose some 300,000 words of an incomplete tome. “Mippel,” as she calls the unfinished work, in reference to mythical poet and visionary William Blake’s “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love” (1789), is a typically erudite allusion.

Seven years into writing “Mippel,” Ozick entered herself in a novella contest of sorts, assuming that she could complete a short piece of fiction in six weeks, then return to her novel. The novella project grew longer, however, consuming another seven years of her life, and eventually evolved into Ozick’s first published work, Trust (1966). Coinciding with its publication, Ozick gave birth to her only child, Rachel, at the age of thirty-seven. Although Ozick continued to read and write, activities she believes she does out of necessity, raising her daughter was distracting enough that she had little time to enjoy her new status as a published author.

Having always suffered from what she calls “age-sorrow,” Ozick has measured the scale of her achievements on a chronological basis. Because she assumed that she would have published something of “literary merit” by the time she was twenty-five, and because she is highly self-critical, Ozick was not then unduly impressed with her literary achievement, and she has continued to doubt the mass appeal of her writing. Although her first novel met with widespread acclaim, it occurred twelve years later than she expected, thus diminishing her personal satisfaction.

After producing only one published work after fourteen years of novel writing, Ozick turned to short stories and novellas. In 1971, she published a volume of well-received short fiction, The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, in which she illustrated the fact that profound subject matter can exist in the shorter fiction genres. Five years later, Ozick followed with more short fiction, Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976). She did not attempt another novel until the mid-1980’s, when she published two novels, both considerably shorter than Trust. These were The Cannibal Galaxy (1983) and The Messiah of Stockholm (1987). In 1989, she published The Shawl, which includes the novella Rosa. The play