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 the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival.
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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.
