Francine du Plessix Gray, Polish-born American author and critic, Died at 88

Francine du Plessix Gray was born on September 25, 1930, in Warsaw, Poland, and died on January 13, 2019.

She was an American Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic.

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 Liberman, another White Russian émigré, whom she had known in Paris as a child.

(During his love affair with Liberman's mother, her uncle, Alexandre Yacovleff, had recruited Tatiana to keep the boy occupied.)

He was a noted artist and later a longtime editorial director of Vogue magazine and then of Condé Nast Publications. On 23 April 1957, she married the painter Cleve Gray and until his death they lived together in Connecticut.

The couple had two sons.

Francine du Plessix Gray died on January 13, 2019 in Manhattan.