Elizabeth Cullinan

Elizabeth Cullinan
Born	7 June 1933 New York
Died	26 January 2020 Towson, Maryland
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Irish–American
Genre	Fiction
Notable works	House of Gold (1970), The Time of Adam (1971), Yellow Roses (1977), A Change of Scene (1982)
Notable awards	Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award

Elizabeth Irene Cullinan (7 June 1933 – 26 January 2020) was an Irish–American writer who started her career as a typist at The New Yorker magazine, which published her stories from 1960 to 1981. She produced two short story collections, The Time of Adam (1971) and Yellow Roses (1977), and two novels, House of Gold (1970) and A Change of Scene (1982). Cullinan was not well-known but her modest output earned her "outsize acclaim" from her contemporaries, including Joyce Carol Oates, and comparisons to Chekhov and Joyce. Her work centred primarily on working class Irish-Americans, Catholicism and "women keen to avoid the lives their mothers had". She won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Carnegie Fund.

Early life

Cullinan was born on 7 June 1933 in The Bronx, New York City, to Cornelius and Irene (née O'Connell) Cullinan. She had two sisters, Margaret Mary and Claire. She was educated at St. Raymond's grammar school, in the Academy of Mount St. Ursula, a convent school in The Bronx and won a scholarship to Marymount College on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She graduated from there in 1954. Due to her father's financial difficulties, the family had to move in with her maternal grandmother.

Career

Cullinan started working at The New Yorker at age 22, initially as a typist. She typed up manuscripts by authors such as John Updike, James Thurber and E.B. White. She became secretary to William Maxwell, one of the magazine's fiction editors, who told her to "go and be a writer". She began publishing her short stories in The New Yorker in 1960. Her first story was called The Ablutions and was published on 29 January 1960. She continued to publish in the New Yorker until 1981.

She lived in Dublin, Ireland from 1961 to 1963 and her time there inspired her novel House of Gold (1970), which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. Her stories set in Ireland cast a critical eye and avoided "migrant-return myths". Her short story The Swim tells of a day trip to the beach with an Irish writer, likely John McGahern with whom she had a relationship. She befriended Irish writer Mary Lavin and their relationship is celebrated in her short story Maura's Friends.

She published two collections of short stories, The Time of Adam (1971) and Yellow Roses (1977), and two novels, House of Gold (1970) and A Change of Scene (1982). At the time of her death, she had completed a third novel, Starting From Scratch, a fictionalised account of her time at The New Yorker.

Cullinan received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Carnegie Fund. She taught at Fordham University, the University of Massachusetts, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Critical response

Though never well-known in Ireland or the United States, her modest output "earned her outsize critical acclaim", including comparisons to Chekhov and Joyce. According to a review by author Joyce Carol Oates, "Miss Cullinan is always intelligent, precise and skillful, turning out stories of near‐faultless craftsmanship."

On April 9, 2024, Fordham University hosted a panel discussion of her life and work to mark the re-issue of Yellow Roses. Panelists included novelists Peter Quinn and Mary Gordon, Fordham's Chair of Irish Studies Keri Walsh, and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.

Themes in her work

Cullinan's work centres on the lives of working class Irish-Americans, many of them based in Manhattan and The Bronx, and the concerns of "newly post-Vatican II Irish American Catholics". Her fiction explores Catholics grappling with the sexual revolution and the tensions between a still-pious older generation and young people alienated from religion in a secular world.

Several stories explore the changing roles of women in the 1960s. Many of her characters are Manhattan women with careers, who reject domesticity and find work "creative and sustaining". According to Professor Patricia Coughlan of University College Cork, Cullinan "resists assumptions that women’s concerns and experience are supplementary to men’s". She helped redefine Irish-American literature, moving away from the male tradition of "ward bosses and henchmen".

Later life and death

Cullinan moved to Towson, Maryland in 2015 to be closer to family. She died from lung disease on 26 January 2020 at a retirement community there, aged 86 and is buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y.

Works

House of Gold, by Elizabeth Cullinan (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 328 pp.

The Time of Adam, by Elizabeth Cullinan (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 178 pp.

Yellow Roses, by Elizabeth Cullinan (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 208 pp.

A Change of Scene, by Elizabeth Cullinan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 192 pp.

"Yellow Roses,"by Elizabeth Cullinan. "Introduction: In Praise of Resurrection," by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 208 pp.