Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles, but grew up in Missouri. She studied English literature at Vassar College, and graduated with a B.A. in 1971. Smiley spent the rest of the decade obtaining a number of degrees in literature and creative writing: an M.A. in 1975, an MFA in 1976, and a Ph.D. in 1978, all from the University of Iowa, arguably the most prestigious school for creative writing in the United States. Smiley published her first novel, Blind Barn, in 1980, when she was 31 years old. Smiley had begun working on the novel while she was an MFA student at Iowa; it was a critical success, but not a commercial one. The same was the case for Smiley’s next three novels, At Paradise Gate (1991), Duplicate Keys (1984), and The Greenlanders (1988). Smiley’s greatest critical and commercial success was A Thousand Acres, published in 1991. This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, two of the three most prestigious prizes for fiction offered to American novelists (the third is the National Book Award, for which Smiley has been nominated on several occasions). Since 1991, Smiley has published 11 novels, four nonfiction books, and five children’s books. She resides in California.