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Table of Contents
Lydia Davis is a well-known American writer who, through her dramatic observations of largely boring and frequent occurrences, has produced peculiar and exceptional short stories. She was widely known for her βflash fictionβ literary works.
See the fact file below for more information on the Lydia Davis or alternatively, you can download our 22-page Lydia Davis worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.
Key Facts & Information
EARLY LIFE
- Born on July 15, 1947, in Northampton, Massachusetts, Lydia Davis has been surrounded by literary people since childhood. Her father was an English literature professor at Smith College, Robert Gorham Davis. Her mother practiced the same profession.
- Lydia moved to New York with her parents when she was 10 years old to help her father take up a teaching job at Columbia University.
- In 1965, she began attending Barnard College, where she met a writer named Paul Auster during her freshman year.
- In the summer of 1973, Davis and her boyfriend, Paul Auster, moved to the South of France as guardians of an 18th-century concrete farmstead with a red tile roof and an indoor garden.
- They lived in Paris for two years, editing French novels, poetry, art catalogs, and film scripts, as well as working diligently on their own fiction.
- In 1974, she married Paul Auster, but it eventually ended four years later.
EARLY YEARS OF CAREER
- Translating was the main source of income for Davis, and she translated works by Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Pierre-Jean Jouve.
- The adaptations she made of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary were met with considerable praise.
- Russell Edson, an American prose poet, influenced Davis to start creating short stories on her own. She had been working hard to come up with a short story that was similar to conventional ones, but she was struggling to do so. Davis credited Edson for inspiring her to do as she wished.
- Her faith in her own style of writing unlocked the way to groundbreaking experiments in vocabulary and writing norms.
- Davis identified her place in making the ordinary into thought-provoking short narratives.
- Her tales can be so short, often just one paragraph, that they have been variously classified as poetry, insights, parables, jokes, metaphors, and anecdotes.
SOME NOTABLE WORKS
- In 1976, The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories was published as her first book of stories.
- 11 years after her first collection, her fourth set, known collectively as Break It Down, made her a finalist for the 1987 PEN/Hemingway Award.
- In 1995, Davis made use of a breakup with a partner by publishing a work about him called The End of the Story.
- The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published in 2009.
- One of her more popular works is Head, Heart. Throughout the poem, the audience realizes a variety of instances of rhetorical devices, such as consonance and personification. The narrator relates a story of a human struggling from the death of a loved one and how their hearts and minds feel about it by using the title, the speaker, the circumstance, the use of words, the figurative expression, and the imagery to do so.
AWARDS
- In 1999, her short works and translations led Davis to be called a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French Government. She also became part of the MacArthur Foundation in 2003.
- In 2013, she was given the Merit Medal by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as an international prize by the Man Booker.
Lydia Davis Worksheets
This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about the Lydia Davis across 22 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Lydia Davis worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Lydia Davis who is a well-known American writer who, through her dramatic observations of largely boring and frequent occurrences, has produced peculiar and exceptional short stories. She was widely known for her βflash fictionβ literary works.
Complete List Of Included Worksheets
- Lydia Davis Facts
- Stairway to Success
- Fill the Gap
- Interpret a Story
- When Was It Published?
- Agree or Disagree?
- The Inspiration
- What Book Was It?
- Write Uniquely
- The Path of Success
- Imagine the Mind
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Use With Any Curriculum
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