Hortense Calisher (1911-2009)

Hortense Calisher, the novelist and short story writer whose intellectually challenging writing style brought strong reactions from critics for over half a century, had died in Manhattan at age 97. She was the author of 23 books, starting in 1951 with a story collection called In the Absence of Angels, and continuing to publish through her eighties and nineties. Her last book, the novel Sunday Jews, was published in 2002. A New York Times obituary by Holcomb B. Noble casts her in a “Jamesian” school of “fascination with authorial intellect,” and cites critic Morris Dickstein, who once said, “Calisher has never been a writer who masked her thinking self or disappeared into her subject.”