Dorothy allison biography

Biographies Dorothy Allison. Describing herself as a feminist and a working class storyteller who writes to change the world, Dorothy Allison is an accomplished writer and speaker who frankly tackles gender, class, violence, and sexual orientation. Dorothy was born on April 11, in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of Ruth Gibson Allison, a poor, unmarried fifteen-year-old.

Dorothy and her younger sister did not get to know their father, who died when they were still babies.

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Ruth worked as a waitress and clothes launderer and maintained close relationships with her own mother and sister. From an early age, Dorothy admired her grandmother and Aunt Dot as strong women and dazzling storytellers. When Dorothy was five, Ruth married a route salesman who began sexually abusing Dorothy. At age eleven, Dorothy was able to talk of the continuing molestation to a cousin, who informed Ruth.

Dorothy allison obituary

Although Ruth took the children away from their stepfather for few weeks, they returned when the stepfather swore he would stop. Allison did begin to create another future, winning a national merit scholarship to Florida Presbyterian College now Eckerd College. Upon graduation in , she worked as a substitute teacher, maid, and Social Security Administration clerk, while volunteering at a feminist magazine and rape crisis center.

During the s and early s, she was an award winning editor and writer for early feminist and lesbian and gay journals including Quest , Conditions , and Outlook. With her first published work, a collection of poetry called The Women Who Hate Me , Allison honored and scrutinized her class background and sexuality, and at the same time outraged mainstream feminists by lauding promiscuity, sadomasochism, and butch-femme roles.

In she won two Lambda Literary Awards for a short story collection, Trash. Allison won the strongest mainstream praise for her largely autobiographical novel, Bastard out of Carolina , a best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award. In Bastard , Allison offers a loving, humorous, and unsentimental portrayal of a girl from a poor family who suffers sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.