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    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "The Long-Distance Runner"
    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "The Long-Distance Runner"
    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "The Long-Distance Runner"
    Ebook28 pages17 minutes

    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "The Long-Distance Runner"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "The Long-Distance Runner," 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535838054
    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "The Long-Distance Runner"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "The Long-Distance Runner" - Gale

      1

      The Long-Distance Runner

      Grace Paley

      1974

      Introduction

      The Long-Distance Runner by Grace Paley is the last story in the collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which appeared in 1974. The story is also available in The Collected Stories (1994). The story features Paley's lead protagonist, Faith Darwin Asbury, who at forty-two has taken up long-distance running. This semi-autobiographical character shares Paley's concern for social justice and her awareness of the cultural and economic divisions between the races, recurrent themes in Paley's fiction. The short story foregrounds Paley's skillful use of dialogue as a way of dramatizing differences between individuals in a given neighborhood. In this story, Faith travels back to her childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn and witnesses from the inside the deterioration of the now all African American tenement where her family once lived.

      Author Biography

      Grace Paley was born on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx, New York. Her parents, Manya Ridnyik Goodside and Dr. Isaac Goodside, were Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States in 1906. Paley's parents were socialists who had engaged in political resistance efforts against the Russian czar and had been exiled (her father to Siberia; her mother to Germany) as a result. They settled originally in lower Manhattan where they were joined by his mother and two sisters, who, along with his wife, supported Isaac Goodside while he studied

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