Alison Lurie - Non-Fiction

Non-Fiction

In 1981 Lurie published The Language of Clothes. This book lays out some principles of communication by means of dress.

Lurie co-edited the Garland Library of Children's Classics (73 vol.). In 1990, she published Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature. A further collection of essays on this theme, Boys and Girls Forever, appeared in 2004.

She often reviews literature and children’s culture for the New York Review of Books.

In 2001 Lurie published a memoir, Familiar Spirits, recounting a decades-long friendship with poet James Merrill (1926–1995) and his partner David Jackson (1922–2001). Lurie credits Merrill and Jackson for encouraging her writing in the 1950s, a period during which she suffered many rejections from publishers.