Jane Smiley | |
|---|---|
 Smiley at the 2009 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | September 26, 1949 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Education | Vassar College (BA) University of Iowa (MA, MFA, PhD) |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1992 American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2001 |
Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949) is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991). [1]
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from Community School and from John Burroughs School. She obtained a BA in literature at Vassar College (1971), then earned an MA (1975), MFA (1976), and PhD (1978) from the University of Iowa. [2] While working toward her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. [3] From 1981 to 1996 she was a Professor of English at Iowa State University, [2] teaching undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops. In 1996, she relocated to California. She returned to teaching creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, in 2015.
Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly . Her best-selling A Thousand Acres , a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear , received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists . Her essay "Feminism Meets the Free Market" was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars [4] by Washington Post writer Leslie Morgan Steiner. Her essay "Why Bother?" appears in the anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2013. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel , that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to 21st-century American women's literature.[ citation needed ]
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has participated in the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the Cheltenham Festival, the National Book Festival, the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, and many others. She won the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, [5] and chaired the judges' panel for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2009. [6]
Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections (2001), considers Smiley's book The Greenlanders to be greatly underappreciated and among the best works of contemporary American fiction. [7]
Smiley's then wrote a trilogy of novels about an Iowa family over the course of generations. The first novel of the trilogy, Some Luck, was published in 2014 by Random House. [8] The second volume followed in the spring of 2015, and the third volume in the fall of 2015.
Smiley received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. [1] In 2006, she received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature award which is given annually in Rockville, Maryland, the city where Fitzgerald, his wife, and his daughter are buried, as part of theF. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival.
Carol Ann Shields was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1992.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.
Main Street is a novel written by Sinclair Lewis, and published in 1920. Satirizing small-town life, Main Street is perhaps Sinclair Lewis's most famous book and led in part to his eventual 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. She was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
A Thousand Acres is a 1991 novel by American author Jane Smiley. It won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and was adapted to a 1997 film of the same name. It was premiered as an opera by the Des Moines Metro Opera during their 2022 season.
Robert Olen Butler is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
A Thousand Acres is a 1997 American drama film directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse and starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Robards.
Jocelyn Denise Moorhouse is an Australian screenwriter and film director. She is best known for directing films Proof, How to Make an American Quilt, A Thousand Acres and The Dressmaker.
The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize is a literary prize created in 1988 by the newspaper The Chicago Tribune. It is awarded yearly in two categories: Fiction and Nonfiction. These prizes are awarded to books that "reinforce and perpetuate the values of heartland America."
Vauhini Vara is a Canadian and American journalist and author. She has written and edited for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Some Luck is a 2014 novel by Jane Smiley. It is the first in a trilogy of novels about an Iowa family over the course of generations. It was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award.
The Greenlanders is a 1988 historical-fiction epic novel by American author Jane Smiley.
Horse Heaven is a novel by American author Jane Smiley, published in 2000 by Knopf. It was shortlisted for the 2001 Women's Prize for Fiction.
