The following writers and works were recommended and/or written about by Grace Paley. She read them all.

W.H. Auden*

Isaac Babel †
Red Cavalry
Tales of Odessa
You Must Know Everything

Donald Barthelme
Sixty Stories
Forty Stories
The King

Saul Bellow

William Blake

Lady Borton
Sensing the Enemy: An American Among the Boat People of Vietnam
After Sorrow

Kay Boyle

The Holy Bible ‡

Driss ben Hamed Charhadi
A Life Full of Holes †

Anton Chekhov

Jean Cocteau
The Journals of Jean Cocteau †

Barbara Deming

Charles Dickens

Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed §

Norman Fruchter
Coat Upon a Stick †

Emma Goldman
Living My Life †

Paul Goodman †

Ruth Herschberger
Adam’s Rib

James Joyce
Dubliners

Peter Kropotkin
Memoirs of a Revolutionist †

Clarice Lispector

Donella Meadows ‖

Joan Miró
I Work Like a Gardener †

Wright Morris
The Territory Ahead ‡

Tillie Olsen

Our Bodies, Ourselves

Konstantin Paustovksy
Years of Hope †
The Story of a Life†

Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova
At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel

Rosetta Reitz
Menopause: A Positive Approach

Mel Rosenthal

Philip Roth

Stephen Spender

Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Paula Weideger
Menstruation & Menopause: The Physiology and Psychology, the Myth and the Reality

William Carlos Williams
The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams ¶

Edmund Wilson ‡

Christa Wolf
The Quest for Christa T. 
Patterns of Childhood 
Cassandra 
Accident
What Remains

Women of the Fourteenth Moon: Writings on Menopause
Edited by Dena Taylor and Amber Coverdale Sumrall

Malcolm X and Alex Haley
The Autobiography of Malcolm X†

William Butler Yeats
“The Circus Animals’ Desertion” †

*Paley mentions Auden in “Christa Wolf,” the introduction Paley wrote to Wolf’s essay collection The Author’s Dimension (Ed. Alexander Stephan, trans. Jan Van Heurck, 1993). She studied under the poet at the New School in the early 1940s.

† Recommended in “Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken,” written for Writers as Teachers / Teachers as Writers (Ed. Jonathan Baumbach, 1970) and reprinted in the Teachers & Writers Collaborative periodical Points.

‡ In “The Value of Not Understanding Everything,” one of Paley’s first ever talks.

§ In Paley’s essay “The Unfinished Bronx,” written to accompany Mel Rosenthal’s book of photography, In the South Bronx of America (2000), she says Rosenthal “brought with him to the Bronx not only his particular gifts but the real experience of working in Tanzania with Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed played an important role in the literacy programs of Latin America.”

‖ Referenced in “Connections,” a speech Paley gave to Phi Beta Kappa Harvard graduates the year of her husband’s fiftieth reunion. Of her audience, she writes, “I was in the position of addressing his classmates, some of whom I considered responsible for the Vietnam War and probably other wars. They were, in fact, the people to whom he wrote during his two-week fast in ’65 while he waited to hear their excuses for our bombing of Vietnam’s forests and rice paddies. Of course there were as many in his class who were opposed to that war––probably more––and there were many not present; they had been killed in the Second World War.”

¶ Paley mentions in “Six Days: Some Remembering” that a friend brings her this Williams collection while she serves six days in jail following an arrest at a Vietnam War protest.

Denotes a work or author treated individually by Paley in an essay, talk or book introduction she later collected in Just As I Thought (1999).