Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley | |
---|---|
Smiley at the 2009 Texas Book Festival | |
Born | (1949-09-26) September 26, 1949 (age 74) 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]
Biography
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.
Career
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.
Awards
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.
Works
Novels
- Barn Blind (1980)
- At Paradise Gate (1981)
- Duplicate Keys (1984)
- The Greenlanders (1988)
- A Thousand Acres (1991)
- Moo (1995)
- The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998)
- Horse Heaven (2000)
- Good Faith (2003)
- Ten Days in the Hills (2007)
- Private Life (2010)
- Some Luck (2014)
- Early Warning (April, 2015)
- Golden Age (October 20, 2015)
- Perestroika in Paris (2020)
- A Dangerous Business (2022)
- Lucky (2024)
Short story collections
- The Age of Grief (1987)
- Ordinary Love & Good Will (1989)
Non-fiction books
- Catskill Crafts (1988)
- Charles Dickens (2003)
- A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck (2004)
- Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005)
- The Man Who Invented the Computer (2010)
Young adult novels
- The Georges and the Jewels (2009)
- A Good Horse (2010)
- True Blue (2011)
- Pie in the Sky (2012)
- Gee Whiz (2013)
- Riding Lessons (2018)
- Saddles and Secrets (2019)
- Taking the Reins (2020)
References
- ^ a b "The 1992 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction". The Pulitzer Prizes. 2020. Retrieved 2020-10-27.
- ^ a b Biography at the Encyclopædia Britannica.
- ^ Brandsma, Elliott. "Pulitzer Prize Winner Jane Smiley: "I Thought Icelanders Were Very Straightforward and Smart"". Iceland Writers Retreat. Retrieved 15 September 2021.
- ^ Mommywars.net
- ^ "Winners". PEN Center USA. Archived from the original on 20 December 2013. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
- ^ Man Booker Prize Archived 2009-10-08 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Jonathan Franzen on Underappreciated Books". YouTube. 20 April 2012.
- ^ Neary, Lynn (5 October 2014). "For Her First Trilogy, Jane Smiley Returns To Iowa, 'Where The Roots Are'". NPR Books. NPR. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
External links
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Jane Smiley on Charlie Rose
- Jane Smiley at IMDb
- Jane Smiley collected news and commentary at The Guardian
- Jane Smiley collected news and commentary at The New York Times
- 2004 Slate article: "The unteachable ignorance of the red states"
- Write TV Public Television Interview with Jane Smiley
- 2003 interview of Jane Smiley, IdentityTheory
- 'Jane Smiley's Good Faith'[usurped], review of Good Faith in the Oxonian Review
- 2010 Monterey Weekly article: "In her new novel, Private Life, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author uses family history as fictional fodder."
- KCRW Bookworm Interview
- Works by or about Jane Smiley at Internet Archive
- v
- t
- e
- His Family by Ernest Poole (1918)
- The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (1919)
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1921)
- Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (1922)
- One of Ours by Willa Cather (1923)
- The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (1924)
- So Big by Edna Ferber (1925)
- Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1926; declined)
- Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield (1927)
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1928)
- Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (1929)
- Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge (1930)
- Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (1931)
- The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1932)
- The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling (1933)
- Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Pafford Miller (1934)
- Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935)
- Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis (1936)
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1937)
- The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand (1938)
- The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939)
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1940)
- In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow (1942)
- Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair (1943)
- Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin (1944)
- A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (1945)
- All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1947)
- Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener (1948)
- Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (1949)
- The Way West by A. B. Guthrie Jr. (1950)
- The Town by Conrad Richter (1951)
- The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (1952)
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953)
- A Fable by William Faulkner (1955)
- Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1956)
- A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958)
- The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor (1959)
- Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1960)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961)
- The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor (1962)
- The Reivers by William Faulkner (1963)
- The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau (1965)
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
- The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1967)
- The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1968)
- House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969)
- The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford (1970)
- Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1972)
- The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (1973)
- No award given (1974)
- The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975)
- Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (1976)
- No award given (1977)
- Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (1978)
- The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1979)
- The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1980)
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1981)
- Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (1982)
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983)
- Ironweed by William Kennedy (1984)
- Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1985)
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1986)
- A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1987)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988)
- Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1989)
- The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
- Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (1991)
- A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (1992)
- A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler (1993)
- The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1994)
- The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1995)
- Independence Day by Richard Ford (1996)
- Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (1997)
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998)
- The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1999)
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2001)
- Empire Falls by Richard Russo (2002)
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2004)
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2005)
- March by Geraldine Brooks (2006)
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007)
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2008)
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009)
- Tinkers by Paul Harding (2010)
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)
- No award given (2012)
- The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (2013)
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2014)
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2015)
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016)
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017)
- Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2018)
- The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019)
- The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (2020)
- The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (2021)
- The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen (2022)
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver / Trust by Hernan Diaz (2023)
- Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (2024)