Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin (1936-24) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 196s, '7s and '8s. Her stories are culled from her early childhood in various Western mining towns; her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a lifelong problem with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons, including as a high-school teacher, a switchboard operator, a physician's assistant, and a cleaning woman. Two collections of her work were published posthumously: A Manual for Cleaning Women and Evening in Paradise.