The Truth About Lorin Jones: A Novel

Alison Lurie

Nov 2012 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

In this comedy by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a biographer out to vindicate a neglected female artist learns that the truth is never tidy.
 
Polly Alter is through with men. Recovering from her divorce, she has taken a year off from her museum job to write a biography of Lorin Jones, a sensitive painter who died young and nearly forgotten. Polly is determined to bring the artist the public acclaim she deserves, making up for the neglect and exploitation Lorin suffered from the men in her life.
 
The only problem with the story of Lorin’s victimhood is that it may not be true. And as Polly wades deeper into her research, growing more attached to her subject, and more lost in the world of two decades past, she begins to realize that no life story is as simple as a biographer might wish.
 
The National Book Award–shortlisted author of Foreign Affairs writes a daring and “relentless comedy” that novelist Edmund White calls “one of the most entertaining novels I've read in a long time” (The New York Times).
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alison Lurie including rare images from the author’s collection.
 
 

About the author

Alison Lurie (1926–2020) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she joined the English department at Cornell University in 1970, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others. Her first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), is a story of romance and deception among the faculty of a snowbound New England college. It won favorable reviews and established her as a keen observer of love in academia. It was followed by the well-received The Nowhere City (1966) and The War Between the Tates (1974). In 1984, she published Foreign Affairs, her best-known novel, which traces the erotic entanglements of two American professors in England. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Her most recent novel is The Last Resort (1998). In addition to her novels, Lurie’s interest in children’s literature led to three collections of folk tales and two critical studies of the genre. Lurie officially retired from Cornell in 1998, but continued to teach and write in the years following. In 2012, she was awarded a two-year term as the official author of the state of New York.