Gina Berriault
{{Short description|American novelist, short story writer}}
Gina Berriault (January 1, 1926 – July 15, 1999) was an American novelist and short story writer.{{cite web |url=http://www.reaaward.org/html/gina_berriault.html |title=Gina Berriault |work=Rea Award for the Short Story |publisher=Rea Award.org/Dungannon Foundation |access-date=May 24, 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100705150345/http://www.reaaward.org/html/gina_berriault.html |archive-date=July 5, 2010 }}
Biography
Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.
Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.
Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.
She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984.{{IMDb title|0088176|The Stone Boy (1984)}} The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.{{IMDb title|0389410|The Stone Boy (1960)}}
Death and legacy
Berriault died in 1999, at age 73, at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California.{{cite news |url= https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/23/arts/gina-berriault-73-an-author-of-deft-novels-and-short-stories.html|title= Gina Berriault, 73, An Author Of Deft Novels And Short Stories (obituary)|date= July 23, 1999|work= The New York Times|access-date=May 24, 2010}} The Gina Berriault Award, created by Peter Orner and Fourteen Hills Review at San Francisco State University in 2009, honors Berriault's legacy.
Bibliography
;Novels
- The Descent (1960)
- A Conference of Victims (1962)
- The Son (1966)
- The Lights of Earth (1984)
;Story collections
- Short Story (1958; a Scribner's showcase volume for four then-new writers: Berriault, Richard Yates, Seymour Epstein and Bonnie Barnett).
- The Mistress and Other Stories (1965)
- The Infinite Passion of Expectation: Twenty-five Stories (1982)
- Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996)
References
{{reflist}}
External links
- {{IMDb name|0077348|Gina Berriault}}
- [http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2005/woman-rose-colored-dress The Woman in the Rose-Colored Dress], a short story, Narrative Magazine (Fall 2005).
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Berriault, Gina}}
Category:20th-century American novelists
Category:American women novelists
Category:American women short story writers
Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Category:American writers of Russian descent
Category:Jewish American novelists
Category:Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
Category:San Francisco State University faculty
Category:PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners
Category:Writers from Long Beach, California
Category:20th-century American women writers
Category:20th-century American short story writers