Arrivederci e tanti auguri : scrittura e dintorni nella vita di Grace Paley

This paper attempts to map out the almost complete merging of Grace Paley’s biography and work; that is the overlapping of the public persona she has become over the decades – mostly from the Sixties to the Eighties – and the critically acclaimed short-story writer of The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes At the Last Minute and Later the Same Day. Her short-stories are thus read in the light of three fields of study which are both biographical and fictional: her being born into a family of Jewish-Russian immigrants living in the Bronx; her being a working-class mother of two in the West Village in the Fifties and Sixties and her coming to write within an urban community of women; her symbiotic relationship with New York City and her ongoing commitment to keep its places “public