A Thousand Acres Study Guide

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.

A Thousand Acres is mostly set in the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was the president of the United States. Carter was seen by many as an incompetent, ineffectual leader, and perhaps the novel’s themes of impotence and infertility, and its frustrated tone are meant to mirror the famous “malaise” of the Carter era. The novel also alludes to some of the milestones of the feminist movement of the late 50s and 60s, led by activists like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. Thanks to the success of the women’s rights movement, women in the late 70s had more opportunities for financial and sexual independence than their mothers, even if they continued to battle sexism and the “soft” bigotry of low expectations.

A Thousand Acres is designed as a modernization of William Shakespeare’s 1606 play King Lear, sometimes called the greatest play (or even the greatest work of literature) ever written. Almost every major character in the novel has a direct counterpart in King Lear; where Shakespeare tells the story of an elderly king who divides up his kingdom between three daughters, one of whom refuses the gift, Smiley tells the story of a powerful farmer who divides up his land between three daughters, one of whom refuses to accept. Smiley was also influenced by Pearl Buck’s 1931 opus The Good Earth, which is set in Chinese farmland, and follows a family across multiple generations. While the plot of Smiley’s book has little to do with Buck’s, their lyrical descriptions of soil and land are remarkably similar. Finally, Smiley has praised the novels of Willa Cather, particularly My Antonia (1918). Cather’s books are frequently set in Midwest farming communities (My Antonia takes place mostly in Nebraska, for instance), and tackle many of the same themes as A Thousand Acres, including gender dynamics and inheritance.