Gina Berriault

Background

Gina Berriault was born on January 1, 1926, in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father, a writer and editor of trade magazines, encouraged her early interest in fiction. His death when she was in her teens forced her to continue his work to help support the family, which had settled in the Los Angeles area.

Career

Berriault held a variety of jobs such as waitressing and clerking to support herself when her writing could not. Her writing career progressed in the '50s, and by the early 1960s, her stories began to appear in leading magazines, literary journals and "best" short story collections. She eventually taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, but her fiction was what drew attention to her.

Her first novel, The Descent, was published in 1960 and was followed by Conference of Victims and The Son, also in the 1960s. Short-story collections were published under the titles The Mistress and The Infinite Passion of Expectation. Her next novel, The Lights of Earth, was published in 1984, the same year a film was made from her short story The Stone Boy. Berriault wrote the screenplay for the movie starring Glenn Close and Robert Duvall, which told the story of a young boy unable to express his grief after killing his brother in a hunting accident.

Achievements

• Berriault is most commonly known for mostly short stories that was rewarded with critical, if not commercial, success.
  
  She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Tea Ceremony: The Uncollected Writings of Gina Berriault

    (Compiled by Gina Berriault’s daughter and by her long-tim...)

    2003
  • Afterwards

    (Hal O. Costigan, candidate for Congress, is the kind of m...)

    1998
  • The Descent 1960
  • Conference of victims 1962
  • The son 1966
  • The Lights of Earth 1984
  • The Mistress and Other Stories 1965
  • The Infinite Passion of Expectation 1982
  • Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories 1996
  • Stolen Pleasures 2011
  • The Great Petrowski: A Fable 2000

Views

Berriault's writing often dealt with ordinary people in crisis situations.

Quotations: “Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry - with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It’s like trying to pin down the eternal moment.”

Personality

Berriault's skill with words was not debated and many critics found her work to be precise and heartbreaking for the way they dealt with everyday occurrences and people.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Each of Gina Berriault's stories contains a world, beautifully illuminated by the light of the life within it. Her writing, line for line, is the most emotionally precise I know, and her stories are among the wisest and most heartbreaking in American fiction." - Robert Stone, novelist

Connections

During the 1950s, Gina married John Berriault, a musician, with whom she had one child, a daughter. That marriage ended in divorce.

husband:

John Berriault

Daughter:

Julie Berriault