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A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Wants"
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A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Wants", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
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A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Wants" - Gale
17
Wants
Grace Paley
1971
Introduction
Wants
is a short story by American writer Grace Paley that first appeared in 1971 (as the second half of Two Stories: I. ‘Debts,’ II. ‘Wants’
) in the Atlantic, an American literary magazine. It was reprinted in her 1974 collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and in The Collected Stories in 1994 and has also appeared in Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, The Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus, and Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories. The story concerns a woman who encounters her ex-husband as she is returning two overdue books at a library; the meeting results in a rapid and comic self-appraisal. At just under eight hundred words, it qualifies as flash fiction, a genre characterized by extremely short length, but its deceptively simple plot covers a range of themes. It is noteworthy as well for certain elements of postmodernism.
Author Biography
The author was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx. Her parents were Jewish socialists from Ukraine. Exiled by Czar Nicholas I for their politics, they immigrated in 1906 to New York City, where her father became a doctor. In the Goodside household, she learned to converse in Russian, Yiddish, and English.
At the age of fifteen, Paley dropped out of school: I couldn't see myself doing anything except hanging out, reading books, talking to people,
she explains in a 2004 interview with Melissa Denes. I loved my two English classes and I wouldn't miss one for anything, but I was bad at math, stupid at economics.
At seventeen, Paley was working at an elevator repair company and taking classes at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, where the English poet W. H. Auden encouraged her to write.
At nineteen, she married Jess Paley, a cameraman and filmmaker in the army. After World War II, they had two children, and domestic life
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