Jane Smiley

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]

Jane Smiley
Smiley at the 2009 Texas Book Festival
Born (1949-09-26) September 26, 1949
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma materJohn Burroughs School
Vassar College (BA)
University of Iowa (MA, MFA, PhD)
AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1992
American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2001

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.

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]

Jane Smiley speaking at the Vancouver Writers Fest on her 2014 novel, Some Luck

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

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
  1. "The 1992 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction". The Pulitzer Prizes. 2020. Retrieved 2020-10-27.
  2. Biography at the Encyclopædia Britannica.
  3. Brandsma, Elliott. "Pulitzer Prize Winner Jane Smiley: "I Thought Icelanders Were Very Straightforward and Smart"". Iceland Writers Retreat. Retrieved 15 September 2021.
  4. Mommywars.net
  5. "Winners". PEN Center USA. Archived from the original on 20 December 2013. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  6. Man Booker Prize Archived 2009-10-08 at the Wayback Machine
  7. "Jonathan Franzen on Underappreciated Books". YouTube.
  8. 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.
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