Teaching
Paley taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College from 1966 to 1989, and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in 1967. She also taught at Columbia University, Syracuse University and the City College of New York. Paley summarized her view of teaching during a symposium on "Educating the Imagination" sponsored by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1996:
"Our idea," Paley said, "was that children...by writing, by putting down words, by reading, by beginning to love literature, by the inventiveness of listening to one another...could begin to understand the world better and to make a better world for themselves. That always seemed to me such a natural idea that I’ve never understood why it took so much aggressiveness and so much time to get it started!"
Politics
In the 1950s, Paley joined friends in protesting nuclear proliferation and American militarization. She also worked with the American Friends Service Committee to establish neighborhood peace groups, through which she met her husband Robert Nichols.
With the escalation of the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League and came to national prominence as an activist when she accompanied a 1969 peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. She served as a delegate to the 1974 World Peace Conference in Moscow and in 1978, was arrested as one of "The White House Eleven" for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner (that read "No Nuclear Weapons...No Nuclear Power...USA and USSR") on the White House lawn.
Writings
After a number of rejections, Paley published her first collection,
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) with Doubleday. The collection features eleven stories of New York life, several of which have since been widely anthologized, particularly "Goodbye and Good Luck" and "The Used-Boy Raisers." The collection introduces the semi-autobiographical character "Faith Darwin" (in "The Used-Boy Raisers" and "A Subject of Childhood"), who later appears in six stories of
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and ten of
Later the Same Day. Though as a story collection by an unknown author, the book was not widely reviewed, those who did review it (including Philip Roth and
The New Yorker book page) tended to rate the stories highly. Despite this initial lack of publicity,
The Little Disturbances of Man went on to build a sufficient following leading it to be reissued by Viking Press in 1968.
Goodbye and Good Luck was adapted as a musical by Mabel Thomas (book), Muriel Robinson (lyrics) and David Friedman (music) in 1989 and is currently being reworked.
Following the success of
Little Disturbances of Man, Paley's publisher encouraged her to write a novel. After several years of tinkering with drafts, Paley abandoned the project and turned back to short fiction. Instead, with the aid of Donald Barthelme, Paley assembled a second collection of fiction in 1974,
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. This collection of seventeen stories features several recurring characters from
Little Disturbances of Man (most notably the narrator "Faith," but also including Johnny Raferty and his mother), while continuing Paley's exploration of racial, gender, and class issues. The long story, "Faith in a Tree," positioned roughly at the center of the collection, brings a number of characters and themes from the stories together on a Saturday afternoon at the park. Faith, the narrator, climbs a tree to get a broader perspective on both her neighbors and the "man-wide world," and after encountering several war protesters, declares a new social and political commitment. The collection's shifting narrative voice, metafictive qualities, and fragmented, incomplete plot have led most critics to classify it as a postmodernist work.
Paley continues the stories of Faith and her neighbors in the collection
Later the Same Day (1985). All three volumes were gathered in her 1994
Collected Stories, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Paley's other honors include a 1961 Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, the Edith Wharton Award (1983), the Rea Award for the Short Story (1993) the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1993), and the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts (1994). In 1988 American composer Christian Wolff set eight poems from
Leaning Forward (1985) for soprano, bass-baritone, clarinet/bass-clarinet and cello.