The Bear Boy

Writer Cynthia Ozick was born on April 17, 1928. She grew up in the Bronx and attended New York University, where she earned a B. A., and The Ohio State University, where she completed her master's degree in English literature with a specific focus on Henry James's works.

Ozick wrote the novel Trust, and the short stories "The Sense of Europe", which was published in Prairie Schooner, and "The Shawl", which was included in The World of the Short Story. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Partisan Review, and Esquire. Ozick has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Harold Straus Living Award from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Three of her stories won first prize in the O. Henry competition. In 1986, she was selected as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2000, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Quarrel & Quandary. Her novel Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) won high literary praise. Ozick was on the shortlist for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Malamud Award, which was established by Bernard Malamud¿s family to honor excellence in the art of the short story. Her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (2012).

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