Mary Gordon(II)
Mary Gordon grew up in Valley Stream, New York, a few towns southeast
of Queens. Her early books are about the effects of an orthodox
Irish-Catholic background on women and her later novels are about being
a woman and an artist. Her 1978 novel, 'Final Payments', made her an
overnight success at age 29. She continued her career with 1981's
bestseller 'The Company of Women', won the O. Henry award for short
fiction in 1996, and received much acclaim for the 1996 memoir 'The
Shadow Man', her autobiographical search for the true identity of her
father, who was born in Vilna, Lithuania, and whose immigrant family
spoke only Yiddish; a Jew who converted to Catholicism in 1937, he died
when she was 7 years old. Her mother was Anna Gagliano, a legal
secretary, the daughter of Italian and Irish immigrants who never went
past the eighth grade. Gordon studied at Barnard and at Syracuse
University. Her first husband was an Englishman whom she met while
living in London.