Alison Lurie, prize winning novelist, dead at 94

By Newsdesk

NEW YORK: Alison Lurie, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose satirical and cerebral tales of love and academia included the marital saga “The War Between the Tates” and the comedy of Americans abroad “Foreign Affairs,” died Thursday at age 94. Lurie, a professor emerita at Cornell University, died of natural causes, according to her husband and partner, Edward Hower. Praised by The New York Times as one of the country’s “most able and witty novelists,” Lurie broke through commercially in 1974 with “The War Between the Tates” and received her highest acclaim for “Foreign Affairs,” winner of the 1985 Pulitzer. Set in London, Lurie’s novel was consciously based on old-fashioned narratives of manners and customs, with one character imagining himself trapped in a Henry James story.