Hortense Calisher was born in New York City on 20 December 1911, the child of Joseph Henry Calisher and Hedwig Lichstern Calisher; they were a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a story-telling Southerner originally from Richmond, Virginia, and her mother a German immigrant. These entangled skeins, Southern, Old World, New York, and Jewish, provide the fabric of much of her early fiction.

Calisher graduated from Barnard College in 1932, not a good year for philosophy majors. Hired by the Department of Public Welfare, she became a social worker, dispensing emergency relief in New York's tenements. This sudden shift from the world of metaphysics and timeless speculation to the realities of immediate human need again and again informs her fiction; perhaps the overriding impulse of her literary style is that her characters' carefully nurtured abstractions perpetually clash with realities.

After marriage to an engineer, she left New York City and...