Gerry McGrath writes:
The facts were never lost on Grace Paley. She was born in 1922 in the Bronx into a Ukrainian-Jewish family. Her father had fled to the United States to escape persecution for his revolutionary views and she grew up with a strong sense of humanity that was to shape her life and brand her writing in a unique way.
      Married at twenty, she published her first collection of stories The Little Disturbances of Man in 1959 and immediately earned praise for the very things that had brought her countless rejection slips over the years: an unconventional approach to narrative style, sexual frankness and for her inventive and humorous dialogue. In fact, what she had found after years of writing both poetry and short stories was a voice. Her second collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), widely regarded as her best work, offered further evidence of a deep-rooted compassion for individuals rather than causes. Paley believed that short stories could be about anything in the world, but that they should retain “ the facts of blood and money”, a striking statement that allows Faith Darwin, the central character of these stories, a divorcee who is crippled in all but spirit by feelings of inadequacy as a wife, mother and political activist to say ultimately that “everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life”. Paley wrote wonderfully about the lives of her characters in ways that made you forget the author’s voice entirely. Her stories were constructed of warmth and fairness and spontaneity and humour. She was a master of her craft who had a poet’s gift for the weight of words.