Mary Gordon is the author of several bestselling novels and works of non-fiction, a book of novellas (The Rest of Life), a collection of stories (Temporary Shelter) and a book of essays (Good Boys and Dead Girls). She is the recipient of a Lila Acheson Wallace – Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. A graduate of Barnard College, Gordon returned to her alma mater, where she is a professor of both literature and writing and also teaches in Columbia’s School of the Arts graduate Writing Division. In 1996 Gordon's memoir about her father, Shadow Man, was published. Gordon's father had died when she was seven years old, and, in researching his life, she learned of the many inconsistencies surrounding his past, including the fact that, though Gordon was raised in an observant Catholic family, her father had actually been born Jewish.
Most Famous Works
Final Payments (1978)
The Company of Women (1981)
Men and Angels (1985)
Temporary Shelter (1987)
The Other Side (1989)
Good Boys and Dead Girls (1991)
The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (1993)
Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father (1996)
Final Payments. Gordon's acclaimed debut novel treats a disillusioned Catholic woman who leaves home for the first time after spending eleven years caring for her invalid father. Gordon, born on Long Island, has specialized in depicting the experiences of Irish American Catholics.
The Company of Women. The novel is composed of monologues by Father Cyprian and the women attracted to his magnetic personality, especially Felicitas Taylor, a young woman grappling with issues such as abortion and social activism. Like her acclaimed first novel, Final Payments, Gordon demonstrates a subtle and sure grasp of contemporary Catholic life.
Men and Angels. This novel is about Anne Foster, an art historian with a troubled relationship with her son. But young women gravitate to Anne, seeing her as the "perfect mother." A complex weave of plot and characters turns on the issue of mothering even as it explores Gordon's much-praised probing of moral and religious issues.
Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays. Noted novelist Gordon crafts provocative essays that reflect the same concerns evinced in her fiction, including meditations on what it means for a writer to grow up Catholic and how women react to the demands of religious institutions. These issues relate to what she sees as male dominance in American literature; women characters rarely achieve the autonomy and authority of their male counterparts.
The Shadow Man. Gordon describes her search to find out more about her father, who had died when she was seven years old. The deceit uncovered by this Catholic writer includes the fact that her anti-Semitic father was himself Jewish. This discovery forces Gordon to question her own identity in a memoir that reviewer William H. Pritchard calls "a passionate and extravagant account."
Spending. Like many of Gordon's novels, this one features an artist figure, Monica Szabo, who is surprised by a male admirer who promises to remedy her complaint that women do not have muses to look after them and pay the rent. This rich man is everything she dreams of, even when he suddenly loses all his money--a disaster solved when Monica finds a new (elderly female) patron. This witty parable about art and life lives up to its subtitle: "A Utopian Divertimento."
Career Highlights: The Mummy's Tomb, Sealed Lips, Pot O' Gold
First Major Screen Credit: Laughing Irish Eyes (1936)
Biography
Diminutive Scottish stage and screen actress Mary Gordon was seemingly placed on this earth to play care-worn mothers, charwomen and housekeepers. In films from the silent area (watch for her towards the end of the 1928 Joan Crawford feature Our Dancing Daughters), Gordon played roles ranging from silent one-scene bits to full-featured support. She frequently acted with Laurel and Hardy, most prominently as the stern Scots innkeeper Mrs. Bickerdyke in 1935's Bonnie Scotland. Gordon was also a favorite of director John Ford, portraying Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Englishwomen with equal aplomb (and sometimes with the same accent). She was the screen mother of actors as diverse as Jimmy Cagney, Leo Gorcey and Lou Costello; she parodied this grey-haired matriarch image in Olsen and Johnson's See My Lawyer (1945), wherein her tearful court testimony on behalf of her son (Ed Brophy) is accompanied by a live violinist. Mary Gordon is most fondly remembered by film buffs for her recurring role as housekeeper Mrs. Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes films of 1939-46 starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, a role she carried over to the Holmes radio series of the '40s. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
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