Jane smiley biography

Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blindinand won a O. It was adapted into a film of the same title in Her essay "Why Bother? Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novelis a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. Jonathan Franzenauthor of The Correctionsconsiders Smiley's book The Greenlanders to be greatly underappreciated and among the best works of contemporary American fiction.

Smiley's then wrote a trilogy of novels about an Iowa family over the course of generations. The first novel of the trilogy, Some Luckwas published in by Random House. Smiley received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Her essay "Why Bother? Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novelis a jane smiley biography meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E.

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Correctionsconsiders Smiley's book The Greenlanders to be greatly underappreciated and among the best works of contemporary American fiction. 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 by Random House. The second volume followed in the spring ofand the third volume in the fall of Awards Smiley was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in As Joanne Kaufman remarked in People, Smiley "has an unerring, unsettling ability to capture the rhythms of family life gone askew.

At age four her parents divorced, and while growing up she rarely saw her father, who suffered from mental illness. Smiley's mother, a newspaper journalist, moved with her daughter to St. Louis, Missouri, where her parents lived. According to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Neil Nakadate, the soon-to-be writer "had frequent contact with the families of her mother's siblings, Jane, Ruth, and David, enjoying the secure environment of this large, close extended family, all of whom were storytellers.

Smiley has said that the first 'novel' she ever knew was her family. During adolescence Smiley became an avid reader and student of history, citing John H. Storer's The Web of Life, a First Book of Ecology, as a particularly strong influence due to its discussions regarding the interconnectedness of life on Earth. In she enrolled at Vassar College, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in During this time she married her first husband, John B.

Whiston; the pair lived in a Connecticut commune. After graduation, Smiley and her husband moved to Iowa City, where she pursued a master's degree in English.

Jane smiley biography

She then began publishing short fiction in journals, and also completed a pair of novels. The themes of family life that have characterized Smiley's body of work were present in her first work of long fiction, Barn Blind, a "pastoral novel of smooth texture andm—like the Middle Western summer in which it is setm—rich, drowsy pace," as Michael Malone described it in the New York Times Book Review.

The story revolves around Kate Karl-son, a rancher's wife, and Kate's strained relationships with her four teenaged children. In At Paradise Gate Smiley looks again at conflict between family members. In this story, elderly Anna Robinson faces the imminent death of her husband, Ike. The couple have had a rough marriage; Ike is an emotionally cold and violent person.

When Anna's three daughters arrive to visit their dying father, old sibling rivalries are revived, tensions between the parents are renewed, and Anna must confront the failures and triumphs of her life. According to New York Times Book Review contributor Valerie Miner, the novel's storyline "is not so much about Ike's death as about Anna's lifem—a retrospective on her difficult past and a resolution of her remaining years.

Smiley experiments with genre fiction in Duplicate Keys, a mystery novel set in Manhattan, but the plot is undergirded by a complex network of family relationships. Smiley demonstrates a considerable sensitivity in the treatment of love and friendship. In addition to fiction, Smiley has penned shorter works, the first of which were published in 's The Age of Grief.

A collection of jane smiley biography stories and a novella, the book focuses on the joys and sorrows of married life. Reviewing the work for the Chicago Tribune, John Blades noted that Smiley writes "confidently and affectingly [about] the delicate mechanics of marriage and family life, the intricate mysteries of love. These events are entirely in keeping with her strong vein of social realism, but they have too a quality of the unpredictable, a quality which gives an uninsistent but pervasive sense of the pain and surprise which lie beneath even the most conventional of lives.

At pages, the historical novel set in fourteenth-century Greenland took Smiley five years to research and write. The book is based on Viking sagas, in particular, on surviving accounts of the colonies the Vikings established in Greenland, but Smiley blends fact and fiction to create a modern novel with a traditional flavor. As Howard Norman explained in the New York Times Book Review, The Greenlanders "employs a 'folkloristic' modem—with its stories overlapping other stories, folded into yet others.

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