Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman, born March 16, 1952, is an American novelist and writer for young adults and children. She was born in New York City and raised on Long Island, New York, and her family history included a Russian-Jewish immigrant grandmother. Hoffman came of age as a writer in the late twentieth century, building a body of work known for magic realism, irony, and stories that make room for magic, unconventional love, and complicated relationships.

Hoffman graduated from Valley Stream North High School in 1969 and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts from Adelphi University. In 1973 and 1974 she was a Mirrielees Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where she earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. While she was twenty-one and studying at Stanford, her first short story, “At the Drive-In,” appeared in Volume 3 of the literary magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask whether she had a novel. At that point, Hoffman began writing Property Of, her first novel.

Property Of was published in 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A section of the novel also appeared in Solotaroff’s literary magazine, American Review. Hoffman’s first job was at Doubleday, which later published two of her novels. Over the decades she wrote across forms and audiences, including the screenplay for the 1983 film Independence Day, starring Kathleen Quinlan and Dianne Wiest.

She is best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted into a 1998 film of the same name and later led to a media franchise. The “Practical Magic” series continued with Magic Lessons, released in October 2020. That third novel in the series is a prequel set in the 17th century and explores the life of Maria Owens, the Owens family matriarch. Hoffman has also received a New Jersey Notable Book Award for Ice Queen and won a Hammett Prize for Turtle Moon.

Hoffman’s work for younger readers includes the Scholastic Press novels Indigo, Green Angel, and Green Witch. With her son Wolfe Martin, she wrote the picture book Moondog. In September 2019 she released The World That We Knew, based on a true story told to her by a fan at a book signing. The woman told Hoffman that during World War II, her Jewish parents had arranged for her to live with non-Jewish people to escape the Nazis. Such children were known as “hidden children,” and Hoffman thought about the woman’s unusual upbringing for years before traveling to Europe to learn more.

Hoffman resides in Boston. After being treated for breast cancer at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, she helped establish the hospital’s Hoffman Breast Center. In 2015, she donated her archives to Adelphi University, her alma mater. For readers of quotations, Hoffman’s appeal lies in the direct force of her subjects: family history, survival, love outside ordinary patterns, and the nearness of magic to daily life. Her sentences belong to books, but they often carry the weight of lived experience.