Jane Smiley | |
|---|---|
 Smiley at the 2009 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | (1949-09-26)September 26, 1949 (age 75) Los Angeles,California, U.S. |
| Education | Vassar College (AB) 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 anAmerican novelist. She won thePulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novelA Thousand Acres (1991).[1]
Born inLos Angeles, California, Smiley grew up inWebster Groves, Missouri, a suburb ofSt. Louis, and graduated fromCommunity School and fromJohn Burroughs School. She obtained anAB in literature atVassar College (1971), then earned an MA (1975),MFA (1976), andPhD (1978) from theUniversity of Iowa.[2] While working toward her doctorate, she also spent a year studying inIceland as aFulbright Scholar.[3] From 1981 to 1996 she was a Professor of English atIowa State University,[2] teaching undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops. In 1996, she relocated to California. She returned to teaching creative writing at theUniversity of California, Riverside, in 2015.
Smiley published her first novel,Barn Blind, in1980, and won a 1985O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published inThe Atlantic Monthly. Her best-sellingA Thousand Acres, a story based onWilliam Shakespeare'sKing Lear, received thePulitzer Prize for Fiction in1992. It was adapted into afilm of the same title in 1997. Her novellaThe Age of Grief was made into the2002 filmThe Secret Lives of Dentists. Her essay "Feminism Meets the Free Market" was included in the 2006 anthologyMommy Wars[4] byWashington Post writerLeslie Morgan Steiner. Her essay "Why Bother?" appears in the anthologyKnitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting,published byW. 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 ofE. M. Forster's seminalAspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan'sMurasaki Shikibu'sThe Tale of Genji to 21st-century American women's literature.[citation needed]
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member ofThe American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has participated in the annualLos Angeles Times Festival of Books, theCheltenham Festival, theNational Book Festival, theHay Festival of Literature and the Arts, and many others. She won thePEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006,[5] and chaired the judges' panel for the prestigiousMan Booker International Prize in 2009.[6]
Jonathan Franzen, author ofThe Corrections (2001), considers Smiley's bookThe Greenlanders to be greatly underappreciated and among the best works of contemporary American fiction.[7]
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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 byRandom House.[8] The second volume followed in the spring of 2015, and the third volume in the fall of 2015.
Smiley received thePulitzer 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.
