Francine du Plessix Gray

Francine du Plessix Gray is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic. She was born September 25, 1930 in Warsaw, Poland where her father, Vicomte Bertrand Jochaud du Plessix, was a French diplomat - the commercial attaché. She spent her early years in Paris, where a milieu of mixed cultures and a multilingual family (French father and Russian mother) influenced her. Her father, then a Sub-Lieutenant in the Free French Air Force died ... more

Francine du Plessix Gray is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic. She was born September 25, 1930 in Warsaw, Poland where her father, Vicomte Bertrand Jochaud du Plessix, was a French diplomat - the commercial attaché. She spent her early years in Paris, where a milieu of mixed cultures and a multilingual family (French father and Russian mother) influenced her. Her father, then a Sub-Lieutenant in the Free French Air Force died in 1940, shot down near Gibraltar. Her mother Tatiana Iacovleff du Plessix (1906-1991) had come to France as a refugee from Bolshevik Russia, and ended an engagement to Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1928, before marrying du Plessix. During her widowhood, she once again became a refugee, escaping occupied France via Lisbon to New York in 1940 or 1941 with Francine and Alexander Liberman (1912-1999). In 1942 she married Alexander Liberman, another White émigré from Russia, whom she had known in Paris as a child. (During his love affair with Liberman's... less