Mary Catherine Gordon (USA)

Mary Catherine Gordon (born December 8, 1949) is an American writer and is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is best known for her novels, memoirs and literary criticism.

Mary Gordon was born in Far Rockaway, New York, to Anna Gagliano Gordon, an Italian-Irish Catholic mother, and David Gordon, a Jewish father who converted to Catholicism. While growing up, she attended Holy Name of Mary School in Valley Stream and for high school attended The Mary Louis Academy in Jamaica, N.Y.. She is Catholic.

She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1971, and her M.A. from Syracuse University in 1973. Gordon lived in New Paltz, New York for a time during the 1980s. She and her husband, Arthur Cash, live in New York City and Hope Valley, Rhode Island. They have two adult children, Anna and David. Gordon is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. Cash is retired.

In 1981, she wrote the foreword to the Harvest edition of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." In 1984 she was one of 97 theologians and religious persons who signed A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion, calling for religious pluralism and discussion within the Catholic Church regarding the Church's position on abortion.

Novelist Galaxy Craze has said of Gordon, "She loves to read; she would read us passages in class and start crying, she's so moved by really good writing. And she was the only good writing teacher at Barnard, so I just kept taking her class over and over. She taught me so much."

Circling My Mother: A Memoir (2007) marked her return to nonfiction after two works of fiction.

In 2009 she published a book called Reading Jesus. It uses Gordon's literary training to read the Gospels.

In 2011, she published The Love of My Youth.

Bibliography: 

Novels

Final Payments (1978) ISBN 0-394-42793-9
The Company of Women (1981) ISBN 0-394-50508-5
Men and Angels (1985) ISBN 0-394-52403-9
The Other Side (1989) ISBN 0-670-82566-2
Spending (1998) ISBN 0-684-85204-7
Pearl (2005) ISBN 0-375-42315-X
The Love of My Youth (2011) ISBN 0-307-37742-3

Novellas and short story collections

The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (1994) ISBN 0-14-014907-4
Temporary Shelter (1987) ISBN 0-394-55520-1
The Stories of Mary Gordon (2006) ISBN 0-375-42316-8 (collects Temporary Shelter and 22 previously uncollected stories)
The Liar's Wife (2014) ISBN 978-0-307-37743-2

Non-fiction

Memoirs

The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search For Her Father (1996) ISBN 0-679-74931-4
Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (2000) ISBN 0-684-86255-7
Circling My Mother: A Memoir (2007) ISBN 0-375-42456-3

Essays

Good Boys and Dead Girls, and Other Essays (1991) ISBN 0-670-82567-0

Religion

Reading Jesus (2009)[5] ISBN 0-375-42457-1

Biography

Joan of Arc (2000) ISBN 0-670-88537-1

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Gordon_%28writer%29