SOURCE: Newman, Judie. “Napalm and After: The Politics of Grace Paley's Short Fiction.” Yearbook of English Studies 31, no. 1 (winter 2001): 2-9.

In the following essay, Newman elucidates Grace Paley's anti-Vietnam politics and discusses the impact of her political views on her short fiction.

I object not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where.

(‘A Conversation with my Father’)¹

Grace Paley's commitment to political radicalism has never been in much doubt. Comparatively few contemporary writers have accompanied American POWs home from Hanoi, been arrested on the White House Lawn, or been dragged off in shackles to serve time in the Greenwich Village Women's House of Detention. Paley's pacifist, socialist politics are also deeply rooted in a family past where memories were still fresh of Tsarist oppression—one uncle shot dead carrying the red flag, and parents who reached America only because the...