Cynthia Ozick Biography
Cynthia Ozick was born in Manhattan and has lived in the New
York City area most of her life. She attended Hunter College High School,
graduated Phi Beta Kappa from New York University with honors in English, and
holds a master’s degree from Ohio State University. She lives in Westchester
County and is married to Bernard Hallote, a retired lawyer. Their daughter,
Rachel S. Hallote, an archaeologist, is the director of the Jewish studies
program at the State University of New York at Purchase.
She is acclaimed for her many works of fiction and criticism. She was a finalist
for the National Book Award for her previous novel, The Puttermesser Papers,
which was named one of the top ten books of the year by the New York Times
Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Her most recent essay collection, Quarrel & Quandary, won the 2001
National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Ozick’s work has been
translated into thirteen languages worldwide. Her classic novella The Shawl
was produced for the stage in New York, directed by Sidney Lumet.
Without question, Cynthia Ozick is among the major living
American writers. She has published widely — beginning with the novel Trust
in 1966. Over the years she has written poems, short stories, essays, novels,
and plays. Among them: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971); Art
& Ardor: Essays (1983); The Cannibal Galaxy (1983); The
Messiah of Stockholm (1987); Metaphor & Memory: Essays (1989); The
Shawl (1989); Epodes: The First Poems (1992); Portrait of the
Artist as a Bad Character and Other Essays on Writing (1994); and Fame
& Folly (1996). Her many awards include a Guggenheim fellowship and the
Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters.
She has the unique honor of being the first writer to be given
the Rea Award for the Short Story. In making their selection, the jurors said:
"A writer of great intelligence, moral energy, and imaginative power,
Cynthia Ozick has appreciably widened the range of what the short story is able
to be . . . Reading The Shawl, we are moved past the truth of fact to a
deeper, different understanding; we bear witness to the truth of art. Only
rarely does this happen, and when it does, it must be celebrated."
She published Heir To The Glimmering World in 2004 and Foreign Bodies in 2010.
This biography was last updated on 06/13/2011.
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