This image was lost some time after publication.

Who

A novelist, literary critic and essayist, Ozick is considered one of America's foremost fiction writers.

Backstory

Ozick was born to displaced Polish Jews in Germany and raised in the northeast Bronx. After earning an MFA, she turned down a copyediting position at Little, Brown and instead took a job writing ads for Filene's. She cemented her reputation with her first novel, 1966's Trust. Since then, she's published a shelf's worth of fiction, poetry, and essays, including 1971's The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, 1983's The Cannibal Galaxy, and 1996's Fame & Folly. Her most recent novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, came out in 2004 to excellent reviews; she published a book of essays about literature, The Din in the Head, in 2006, and a collection of four long stories, Dictation, in April 2008. She regularly reviews books for the New Yorker and The New Republic.

Of note

Ozick has won Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, been nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was shortlisted for the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005. But despite her literary achievements and acclaim, she hasn't enjoyed much commercial success. On a 1997 panel called "Book Publishing: Dead or Alive?" then-Barnes & Noble CEO Len Riggio, sitting next to Ozick, ambushed her by revealing that the chain had sold only a few hundred copies of her 1996 book The Shawl, which had been regarded as her biggest success. The incident prompted Ozick to drop her longtime agent and her longtime publisher, Knopf, in favor of agent Melanie Jackson and publisher Houghton Mifflin, after which sales improved slightly.

Drama

In a December 2006 article in The New Republic, the pro-Israel Ozick ignited a minor scandal with a scathing review of a play based on the life of activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed in 2003 attempting to block an Israeli bulldozer from knocking down homes in the Gaza Strip.

Personal

Ozick lives with her husband, retired lawyer Bernard Hallote, in New Rochelle.

No joke

Ozick is a certified technophobe. Her computer modem is rumored to be collecting dust under her dresser. Even being asked to write an online diary for Slate didn't spur Ozick to use email; instead, she submitted her entries via fax.